


Dreamtime

by cleodoxa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Harry Potter Next Generation, M/M, Threesome - M/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-12
Updated: 2010-07-12
Packaged: 2017-10-10 12:54:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 26,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleodoxa/pseuds/cleodoxa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Teddy, Scorpius and Albus embark on a life of crime, nothing proceeds as expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Teddy was terribly excited about becoming an Auror. He'd planned on being one since he was little, with no question in his mind on the matter. People often laughed when they asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and got the answer back so sure and pat. "There are other things," they'd sometimes tell him. "You don't have to make your mind up just yet." It was Harry in particular who'd say this, as well as Ginny and his grandmother, but Harry was probably why he'd been so sure about it in the first place. Harry was his principle male role model, and he was the Boy Who Lived. Which all sounded very difficult and traumatic, and far too much to cope with at such a young age. But he was also Head of the Auror Department, and that seemed to spring from the heroism of his early years. The Auror department was a more sensible arena for fighting all the bad people in the world, and Teddy was submitted to a great deal of explanation about bad people.

Bad people were the explanation for his life really, because, his parents being dead, he lived with his grandmother. His parents had met while fighting bad people, and died fighting bad people. Harry Potter being his godfather, he heard the whole story of Voldemort referred to more often even than most children did, so he very much got the impression that bad people were something that had to be taken into account. The natural thing to do with bad people seemed to be to fight them. Sometimes Harry, on being subjected to long talks on the subject, and asked why everyone didn't want to fight evil, and why didn't all the nice people in the world become Aurors, would carefully point out that Teddy wasn't much of a fighting person, and that fighting wasn't really very nice, so if all the nice people were Aurors, the world would actually be less nice than it was now. Sometimes Teddy detected a lack of faith in his abilities, which might have hurt if he bore grudges.

Another reason why he took the Auror option for granted was that there weren't many other ideas that came his way. Apart from Harry and his dead father, the other men he knew were related to Ginny, whose careers involved joke shops, dragons or politics, none of which appealed to Teddy.

So it was a disappointment when he began as an apprentice Auror, and realised it wasn't his thing at all. Harry had been right when he said fighting wasn't very nice; Teddy lost his faith in it as a simple solution to evil. He could see that it was very important to stop some people doing what they were doing, and that did make the world better, but it was depressing that however you punished them, whatever you said to them, they were still as vile as before, so you weren't exactly lessening the amount of evil in the world, just containing it. And no amount of justice wiped out what they'd done. Teddy could also see what Harry'd been getting at when he suggested fighting made people less nice; he'd learned a few things since he started that he wished he could physically take out of his brain, and everyone else there, including Harry, seemed to take them for granted. Teddy didn't think he was becoming a worse person, but an unhappier one, certainly.

There were other things wrong; Teddy was especially disappointed to realise it was just too stressful, high-powered and too much hard work for him. He'd never been one for sports, because apart from anything else it required constant concentration on something he couldn't see was important, and a lot of the time the Auror department was like that. His mind kept wandering off. Another thing was that only some of the people they dealt with were of the actively distressing variety, and those were the ones he'd been interested in. Teddy thought it might be an idea to split the Department in two, and give the less serious stuff to people like Percy. Then the Aurors wouldn't so archetypically lack enough hours in the day to do their job, let alone anything else. Left to himself, Teddy knew he wouldn't have bothered chasing up half the minor offences. Another piece of knowledge Teddy gained that he could have done without was how very many things were against the law that Teddy thought were quite good ideas.

He stuck it out for a year, probably because everyone kept telling him not to. Harry, seeing that Teddy was not going to let the idea go, had, for the first couple of months been positive and helpful. Then, seeing that it went exactly how he'd expected, he dropped that and started to demand, "What's the point in insisting on doing something that obviously doesn't suit you?"

"You're so stubborn," his girlfriend Victoire said. "If you don't give it up now you will get stubborner and stubborner and won't leave until you're old. Then nobody will want you because you won't know about anything except being a bad Auror."

Victoire was still a schoolgirl at this point, incongruous though that was. Teddy loved her very much. She looked a lot like her mother, though her silver fair hair was full of electricity, so that it was flyaway and crackled a lot. She was very smiley and bossy.

He left after a year because Professor Pastaway, the History of Magic Professor at Hogwarts, wanted to take a year off. It might have crossed Teddy's mind that he'd like leaving the Aurors better if he wasn't so much leaving the Aurors as becoming a history teacher. The idea of standing in for Pastaway for a year might have appealed to him anyway. He'd been a big History of Magic student, and he had a special relationship with history.

He liked thinking about the way things had once been very different to how they were now, yet people always felt as if the time they were living in was now, and the way they did things was modern and normal, even if they were a thousand years ago. Another thing Teddy was interested in was the matter of fact and fiction in history. Many things were considered history that weren't actually true when you read the right books, and who knew how many other things left a trail behind them quite at odds with how they'd actually been? Yet history was quite different to life, and life had been life at the time, even if, with the inexorable progress of time, life had moved on to other people. So history for Teddy was a realm quite apart from questions of fact and fiction, because if you read something in a history book it was history, even if it hadn't actually happened.

Teddy liked the realm of history because it was a little bit like the toy version of life. You could play with it, without actually affecting the world, and for some reason that concept suited Teddy enormously. As a student he learned how to alter the words in books. He would add small details to the class textbooks (he thought the teacher would notice if he started with anything too big); just little things to make the retellings more vivid, more realistic. Then he started on some of the Chronicles that were in the Hogwarts library and not easily found elsewhere. He approached the matter as if he were writing a story, and wanted to entertain the reader and illustrate certain points. Some events should not be left a page-bound morass of names and places but made into beginnings full of promise or foreboding, endings where the villains were punished and the good people rewarded, or else left unresolved to remind the reader of the way things were so often left hanging in real life, which everyone must learn to deal with.

Professor Pastaway's voice often assumed a slight flavour of surprise while reading aloud. Teddy was not there to know how much more surprised she was when she looked something up for class and found it quite different from how she remembered. She was more surprised she'd made the mistake, really, because it made more sense here than how she'd remembered it. Teddy was gratified to hear his own words repeated back to him.

Teddy begged and pleaded to be allowed to stand in for the year. There were some concerns about his age and lack of experience, but Pastaway was biased, Teddy having been a favourite student of hers (in history, it was so nice to find an interested student, who understood why the subject was relevant). He thoroughly enjoyed his time there, though it was odd to be back so soon, and he was not a natural disciplinarian, especially with people only a little younger than himself. He could only be thankful that Victoire had left. He didn't make much in the way of physical changes to books while he was there, but held forth a lot to the students in lieu of reading or asking them to do exercises. Teddy liked making them look beyond the words on the page to see shapes and patterns in the things they spoke of. He got them to write interpretive essays in which they could posit anything they liked as long as they used their evidence convincingly. Lorcan and Lysander Lovegood in first year were especially good at this game. When it came to exam time Teddy admittedly went into a bit of a panic when he looked at the marking scheme and realised how little leeway there was for talking about things that hadn't, by general consensus, actually happened. He managed to impress on the candidates that there were rules that must be followed when it came to exams, and everyone agreed that the results were a credit to him. Teddy was a little sad when Professor Pastaway came back.

"I'm not," said Victoire. "I've hardly seen you. Well, I suppose it's a shame that's not an option, it did suit you. What are you going to do now?"

What Teddy did next was set up a small, work from home business as an apothecary supplier. This was entirely at random. It wasn't even as if he'd liked Potions at school – the ingredients were slippery and smelly and the potions seemed frighteningly liable to blow up. Teddy wouldn't have thought an apothecary suppliers business was so controversial, but all his friends and family were cross about it.

"You're just being contrary," his friend Samuel Bell told him, echoing Victoire. "You're just strangely drawn to anything that doesn't suit you."

Harry and his family put it down to Teddy's feelings about his parents. They thought feeling he had to live up to their dead heroism daunted him, and this confused his thoughts. There wasn't much truth in this, because Teddy had always felt a distinct coldness towards his mother, if not his father. He just hoped his father had been worth it, because he seemed to be all she could think about. Not a thought about leaving her baby without parents to look after him, or leaving her mother childless and bereaved with a grandson to bring up.

Victoire left him. "You're not quite there," she said.

"Oh, thanks," he cried.

"I don't mean that. You're just not here often enough. You make things up too much. In your head, I don't mean you lie. Though you do sometimes. Anyway, I'm very fond of you but you're just not suitable for me. Please don't feel all rejected, it's just a personal thing."

*

After a while Teddy got a little tired of boiling and pulverising things all day. Vaguely inspired by the cards he sometimes got through his door from pretend Muggle witches and wizards, he began to send out chain letters. They promised that the recipient would be married or engaged within the month, if they sent a galleon to a false name Teddy had letters sent to both at a Muggle post office and a wizarding one, and sent the letter on to two specified addresses. (Marriage was about the only thing the cards promised that wouldn't have involved Dark magic if Teddy had tried to accomplish them.) The recipients of the letters did indeed all get married, without the use of any illegal love charms. Teddy had some time ago come across a strangely obscure spell that, if performed on someone's behalf, would bring the person "meant" for them into their orbit. Well, there might be dozens of people that would be suitable, these things not being quite twin soul simple, but the spell chose the one most conveniently at hand.

After a while it was mentioned occasionally as a matter of human interest in both Muggle and wizarding newspapers; the astonishing spate of love at first sight marriages. And after a while Teddy saw why the spell was obscure. Life wasn't life if it was all cake, and all this pairing off involved a great deal of wedding cake. Chance was the preferred medium when lives were being doled out to people, and while it was of course chance that Teddy was doing all this matchmaking, he was operating on a large scale that didn't admit of failure. Not that there wasn't a charm to getting money like this, as if out of thin air. It was as if the universe wanted to send him presents.

He began to set up pretend businesses. There were a lot of businesses, both wizarding and Muggle, that used a great deal of jargon, and seemed only to exist to teach other businesses jargon to speak to yet other businesses. Teddy could speak gobbledygook with great earnestness, and he would round up potential investors from the dubious fringes of the financial world. He thought of it like a game, and the other side had to have a fair chance. That way if they lost the game, they lost the game, with hardly any question of cheating in the matter. Teddy didn't like the idea of taking people's good faith. He accentuated the earnestness, and enjoyed himself seeing how long he could talk, how silly he could make the statements he made while looking the other person solemnly in the face. They would stare back, unable to look away or get a word in edgeways until they giggled, either nervously or sussing that Teddy was just seeing how long he could keep it up.

Sometimes he'd don a Salvador Dali moustache and pastel silk embroidered suits. Sometimes he'd turn the office walls green, with selections from Edward Lear's oeuvre written on them in black. Sometimes he'd bring his pet ferret Boris in and let him wander around his feet, or have a big tank with an octopus in it he called Lady Veronica and would insist on bringing into the conversation. If it were a wizard he was dealing with he'd be alarmingly fond of his tank of grindylow or similar. He'd have rocking chairs for Muggles, flying chairs for wizards – oh, there were any number of ways he could amuse himself and appear less than professional. The people he was dealing with were the kind who might put money into something just for the hell of it, and sometimes they did. Teddy's rented office would swiftly be unrented of course, and if that surprised anyone who expected it to still be there – well it shouldn't, that was all.

Meanwhile he had other girlfriends, and they tended to leave him after a while. When this had happened a few times he got very depressed about it. Teddy started trying men, but that worked out worse, if anything. They tended to be less patient, and minded less about hurting his feelings.

*

When Teddy was twenty-six Hogwarts went on a school trip to Camelot. They rarely went on school trips, the logistics of adequate supervision and keeping the Act of Secrecy among the Muggles proving daunting. However, Professor Pastaway was very keen on her subject and pushed for the project with more than the half-hearted wouldn't it be nice of most of the teachers. Professor McGonagall had a soft spot for Merlin and, more to the point, Camelot was a good choice for a trip because it didn't involve going among Muggles. Somewhere in the Welsh countryside, the place was more Unplotable and Muggle unfriendly than Hogwarts.

Professor Pastaway asked Teddy to join the trip. This was because in his earlier years he'd developed a theory, which became a method of transfiguring particles of air. He could never explain exactly how he did it, though he said it was a little like persuading the particles. With all his efforts, their fabric could not be persuaded into anything more substantial than ectoplasm. About the only thing this skill could be used for was the construction of historical scenes, played out by conjured ghosts. Real ghosts were one of those things; other people's always seemed to be so much more exciting than your own. Not to mention that the most interesting people, who'd actually done things, usually died dead, or that the ones available weren't much for amateur dramatics. (Teddy had asked, and he knew.) These ectoplasmic scenes had a certain charm; one could imagine that the "ghosts" really were the shades of the original players of the drama, being driven to relive it through the ages.

It was a further example of his contrariness that Teddy rarely agreed to put this skill into practice, but Pastaway bullied him into it. She wanted to fire the students' imaginations – her policy with history was to focus on the positive, heritagey things like Merlin. No one liked hearing about goblin rebellions anymore, now that they came with the coda that the cause was entirely just.

The whole school trailed round the castle together, stopping in appropriate spots for conscientious amounts of transparent Merlin uttering wise words, Morgan la Fay shrieking curses, Lancelot and Guinivere stealing kisses. There was a naked girl in a bath, too. Teddy realised that was a bit of a faux pas and slid her down in the tub before Lancelot fished her out with a towel.

After that, Professor McGonagall gave a lecture to students from the fifth year up, on Merlin and what he did for advanced magic, while the lower years were sent off with clipboards to fill in worksheets, in the charge of some of the older students reckoned able to do without the lecture. Teddy wandered off and found Albus and Scorpius Malfoy in charge of a group. Unsurprisingly, Albus was doing all the actual herding. Both boys were of the type no one was willing to actually make prefects, but were constantly entrusted with tasks to inculcate responsibility and level-headedness, or just interaction, in the case of Scorpius.

Since first year Albus had been carrying on an impassioned, fraught rivalry with Scorpius, entirely without Scorpius's assistance. Teddy had heard a bit about it from Albus's siblings and cousins. Albus had arrived at Hogwarts with the intention of proving himself. His father had celebrated his first year by thwarting Voldemort, his next trick being doing it again every school year after that. It wasn't like he envisaged anything on the same scale, but he felt he owed it to Harry to make a definite success. Albus also felt the urge to be more significant because since his brother left for Hogwarts, he seemed to have become so insignificant in James's eyes.

Albus was sorted into Slytherin, as was Scorpius. Albus made friends with Clarissa Mayden, Pansy Parkinson's daughter. She filled him in on Scorpius's father and his past as Harry's schoolboy enemy and nebulous Deatheater. Albus was not especially committed to paying the Malfoys back for their wickedness. After all, he was in Slytherin, something he'd let happen all fired up by Harry's talk of brave Slytherins, in the spirit of beginning to let that time go. Still, it seemed apposite, and it was a mixture of that and Albus's pique at Scorpius's early academic success that started it.

Neither Albus nor Scorpius had any ability or interest in Quidditch, so that degree of repetition was not attempted. It wasn't as if Scorpius was the class entertainer, so the only sphere of rivalry open was schoolwork. It was probably due to Hermione's influence that Albus was ready to see schoolwork as dynamic in a way neither of his parents would have done. Scorpius was quite calm and impervious, never seeming to notice anyone or be noticed himself by anyone besides Albus, except in humorous compassion for being the object of Albus's absurdity.

It seemed fairly pointless to make a show of being more gregarious and better with people than Scorpius, but Albus was trying anyway – making with the loud confident voice and the firm but fair touch with keeping the group in line.

When the lecture was finished and everyone had filled in their worksheets, the students were let loose for one last little meander and a sit-down with whatever they hadn't had for lunch. Teddy caught up with Albus, and they ended up in the room where they kept the pretend Grail, a gorgeous golden cup with jewels and enamel picture panels. The room was filled with music from the spheres, issuing from no apparent source. In the centre of the room there was a holy pond, and at the head was a series of steps leading up to a sort of altar on which the cup was placed. Scorpius was sitting on the bottom step, drinking from a flask of pumpkin juice.

Teddy and Albus went in, nodded to Scorpius, who tried to pretend he hadn't seen them, and sat down by the pond. After a few moments of casual conversation and gazing around the room, Albus said, entirely at random, "I wonder if anyone could steal the Grail." They both gazed at it thoughtfully, and Teddy noticed Scorpius doing likewise.

"I wonder if you could make them think the real one had turned up," Scorpius said, unconsciously, his mouth moving of its own accord. A small shock appeared on his face by the last words.

"You'd do it when the place was full," said Teddy eagerly, "and you'd use those Dark Arts clay people-"

-"Golems," said Albus and Scorpius, who looked slightly frantic.

-"to imitate knights, coming back from the Grail quest. If we just used actors they'd maybe be detained and given Veritaserum. But a golem would be empty of anything other than who they were supposed to be. And when you've got them going, the clay feels like flesh to the touch, doesn't it?"

"I think so," said Albus. "But what about the actual cup? Obviously, the golems would have to give them "the real Grail," but there'd be no point exchanging them a cup as valuable as this here. And I don't see how you'd fob them off with anything else."

"You can prime golems with spells," said Scorpius, with the air of talking to some invisible person who was neither Teddy nor Albus. "You'd put illusory charms on some cup to start with. Then the golems could tie in further illusory charms with this room, so whatever anyone did to the cup in here, they couldn't reveal its true nature. And I'm sure it's possible to bind the cup to the room so no one could take it outside."

"That would be fun," said Teddy, his wistful gaze fixed in mid-air so that he looked to be talking to the same invisible person as Scorpius. "But very silly," he said, his face clearing as he cocked his head. "There are more sensible things to steal." He looked at Albus. Albus was looking at him, amused and surprised, as if to say, What's sensible about stealing? Teddy smiled, feeling silly. Albus was sharp about people sometimes and the thing was, for all that Teddy talked a lot, he didn't say much that wasn't important, even if that was qualified by being "important to Teddy," and often related to a story he was telling himself.

Teddy looked at Scorpius, who was now actually looking at him. Teddy rather liked having Scorpius look at him, though he rather suspected the thing about Scorpius was that he got even less attention than other people noticed getting from him.

"I do do that sort of thing sometimes," Teddy said lightly.

"What, steal stuff?" said Albus, perplexed.

"Sort of. Well, more like conning people." Albus and Scorpius looked unimpressed. Slightly embarrassed, in fact.

"In an, an interesting sort of way, you know. I like to make an occasion out of it. I could do big thefts, like the Grail."

"Being a Metamorphmagus must be useful," said Scorpius, glancing at Teddy's blue hair. (Sometimes, but not today, he has blue eyelashes too.)

"It is. It would be. I think I'd like to be a master thief," Teddy said with plaintive excitement. He wasn't quite sure where the idea had come from, but it was running away with him.

"You're not one already, then?" said Albus, casting a dubious gaze over Teddy, and a furiously indignant one at Scorpius, who still looked nominally interested and engaged.

"I could be better, I could be more. I've had an epiphany." Teddy thought Scorpius liked him a little; his mouth was curled at the corner. "I'm sure you'd be pretty good at it," Teddy told him. "What are you doing after school? Made any plans?"

Scorpius began to look alarmed at the actual content of the conversation, beyond the mere strain of being addressed.

"Yes," said Albus, "What are you doing after school?" Scorpius looked hunted, which pleased Teddy; he guessed Scorpius didn't know. Teddy decided he liked Scorpius, sitting on the stone step fiddling with his flask, a strand of pale hair falling in his anxious face.

"Wouldn't it be fun to be my partner in crime?" Teddy asked. "It'd be great having someone really level-headed about."

"You sound sleazy," said Albus, which was unfortunately slightly true. Teddy was much worse at convincing people to do things in "real life" than when involved in some enterprise. Then he took good care to go off into la-la land, where it was always much to the other person's advantage to be obliging.

"I'm making a very good business offer," Teddy protested. He was feeling a little empty; his latest attempt at a boyfriend had recently left, leaving Teddy in no doubt that he went unimpressed. He was trying to decide whether he should try another girlfriend or another boyfriend right now. A new venture would relieve his feelings perfectly.

"Of course, I've only just met you but you seem pretty bright – it's been you and Albus neck and neck all through school, hasn't it? – and we could have some really good ideas."

Teddy's life felt suddenly flaccid (because that word could be used for things that weren't cocks) and he wanted to do something, make something. Maybe he could make dashing adventures out of his weird hobby of diddling people. Tedddy had suddenly been struck by the need to gather someone or something in, and Scorpius seemed like someone would have to gather him in if he were ever to be in anywhere at all. Teddy beamed at Scorpius, and someone passing the door to the Grail chamber called, "We're assembling in the entrance hall now!"

As Albus and Scorpius left to find their class, Teddy said, "Want  
to meet me in the Three Broomsticks tonight at seven?" It was Saturday, and every other week the seventh years were allowed to visit Hogsmeade on Fridays and Saturdays.

Scorpius didn't even open his lips. Teddy wondered whether, if he got to know him better, he'd be interested or annoyed by What Is Bloody Wrong With Scorpius? Albus, Teddy thought as he looked at his scowling face, seemed blithely plugged into an alternate world where it was not so much, What Is Bloody Wrong With Scorpius, as Why Does He Sabotage Me So?

"Is this a private board meeting or can anyone-"

 

"Oh, you come too, Albus," Teddy said, patting his arm as they separated.

*

Teddy was a little late for seven, but neither Scorpius nor Albus were in the Three Broomsticks when he arrived. He was at the bar when he felt a tap on his shoulder, and saw Albus beaming at him, grasping a fistful of Scorpius's cloak. Scorpius had a face of unstinting anguish and held his hand to his head.

"I have a headache," he said smugly. "I didn't really feel well enough to come."

He was ignored and dragged off to a table, where he was subjected to Teddy rhapsodising.

"Maybe when we've got some experience under our belt we can set ourselves twelve marvellous tasks of theft. Work out the most astonishing things to steal, what would leave a shocking void like star-filled space." He stopped and gazed into the distance a while. The idea frightened him a little, at least what he'd said about star-filled voids.

Albus took to the notion of tasks and worried at him like a terrier for more. Teddy looked over at Scorpius, listening with his elbow on the table, his hand propping up his chin. He thought he seemed a little more comfortable, as if he thought Teddy eccentric and therefore more insensitive to faults in others. Teddy came across this attitude sometimes, and had a resentfully amused resignation for being considered a soul in some pattern too frightful to show the stains.

Teddy drifted off into a consideration of what it was about Scorpius that bothered Albus so. People often forgot that Lily was the youngest Potter child; for some reason Albus held that role in his family though without really seeking it. It was probably to do with this that he'd been the kind of child who tried to force the cat into a jumper in winter. He'd try to assume a protective, bossy relationship with other children, and it would usually end in tears on both sides. Teddy though that Scorpius was the sort of person Albus might have tried to look after, and been resentful when thwarted.

Scorpius had risen to a smiling, slightly patronising politeness, joining in the conversation a little. He seemed tentatively pleased at the idea of embarking on a life of crime – pleased because it seemed so simple (and potentially lucrative; Teddy supposed that Scorpius was quite the self-interested Malfoy at heart). Tentative because Teddy could tell it was only going-to-happen for as long as they were here, now. He would have to chase Scorpius up.

There was a month or so left of the school year, all taken up with exams. Teddy had some slightly tiresome correspondence with Albus. Albus was all "I hope you're going to-" because between his conscience, his bossiness and his ideas of glamour he has a great deal to demand of Teddy and the soap-bubble enterprise he'd invited himself on. Teddy saw it as a soap bubble because it had only been a moment of fancy, a moment of unwarranted kindness towards himself and Scorpius. There were occasions in life when it was nice to spend some time inside a bubble, and even appropriate. Teddy didn't think Albus was a bubble-y sort of person, but it wasn't Teddy's nature to begrudge.

Teddy didn't know quite how Albus and Scorpius were getting on together, but he found the thought of Albus entirely failing to communicate with Scorpius, though plugging valiantly away at the task, strangely amusing. Poor Scorpius, being Albus's own Sleeping Beauty, or Beast, or maybe that girl with the nettle shirts; she couldn't speak.

He sent Scorpius one warm, flippant letter to which there was no response.

A few days after term finished he turned up at Malfoy Manor. A doddery old house-elf let him in and then let him wander around. He met Scorpius coming out of a room. Teddy ignored his look of horror on sighting Teddy, and tried not to feel like Rumpelstiltskin turned up for the baby. Scorpius had obviously fallen out of a Teddy mode of mind. Scorpius's father wandered out of the room behind them. He saw Teddy and stopped in surprise.

"Hello, I'm Teddy Lupin," said Teddy, though he assumed Draco vaguely knew him by sight, being his second cousin. Who else would have blue hair, anyway? "Scorpius agreed to go into business with me, did he tell you?"

He ended up telling Draco and Astoria about the fraud he did now, and how he was thinking of expanding. The Malfoys to some extent proved the scepticism extended towards them, because they obviously held the venture in casual regard as a good source of income. More to the point, they saw it as being terribly constructive for Scorpius in particular. Scorpius was being sullen, but there was a difference about him at home, as if he was "out of himself". Teddy was being nice and cheerful, which encouraged the Malfoys in the idea that sending Scorpius off to him as if to a summer camp might perform the magician's trick of "bringing him out of himself." They were plainly mad about Scorpius, and couldn't understand why he didn't work properly.

Teddy turned up again the next day to make Scorpius pack, and the day after that to move Scorpius in, because somehow that was what had been decided upon. It was not as awkward to be alone with Scorpius as he might have feared, because Scorpius seemed fairly at ease. However it was the at ease of someone who did not actually feel themselves to be in company. When he began to hum softly, Teddy realised he had about as much presence as a television left on; something cheerfully inane that could be left to its own devices. Teddy had no trouble recognising the effect, it was one he had noticed having on people before. But he didn't like being taken for a holograph rather than a human being.

He sent an owl to Albus, who Apparated in shortly afterwards. Unable to bear the prospect of them doing anything without him, he invited himself as not only a partner in crime, but a residential one. Scorpius had the second bedroom, which left Albus on the sofa in the living room, but he was determined not to mind. It was half expected, and even Scorpius looked more resigned than pained.

*

The next morning Teddy sat the three of them down at the kitchen table with a pen and paper. The pen and paper were redundant because Teddy wasn't very interested in taking suggestions.

"I want to steal fine art and occult artefacts. Like the fake Grail," Teddy said.

The other two agreed shruggingly that that had its potential, though they were a little distressed that they couldn't just rip millions off large companies. "Or," said Albus, "think of things to steal that really would be task-worthy. Impossible things, only we'd find a way."

"Charms are really under-explored with regard to finance," said Scorpius. "I'm sure there would be a way of changing the direction money travels in." This was something Draco often wistfully extrapolated on, never being quite ready to explore further.

"It is more ethical to steal from big companies," said Albus.

"Well, collectors, who have most of this stuff, are rich and vain and don't deserve to have nice things," Teddy said firmly. "If you're going to go all socialist and ethical, what more could you want than the relocation of useless objects?"

He had already bought a couple of big shiny coffee table books in which there were photographs of antiques. These contained the usual display of silver and repulsiveness in the form of cows and milkmaids and suchlike. Being wizarding, these things often came with animation, charms and curses long since pronounced illegal. In the back of the books were the names of the museums and collectors who owned the items photographed and with kind permission ect.

Teddy pulled the sheet of paper towards him and began to write the first letter to one of these names. It was a smarmy thing offering his assistance in adding to the addressee's collection. Wishing to appear useful, Scorpius and Albus hastened to write letters themselves.

"Collectors are all obsessives," Albus said sagely. "They sublimate the imperfection of their own lives into the perfection of their collections."

"Exactly," said Teddy. "They'll know what I'm offering and they'll be unable to resist. Unless they're real scaredy cats."

Looking at the wall, Scorpius offered his opinion that they'd both been reading too many old-fashioned novels.

Albus had been glancing at him thoughtfully from time to time, and at this his face lit up. He opened his mouth, ready to start a good old something or other, but the words were not there to oblige him and he had to close his mouth again. It always frustrated him when his feelings moved faster than his brain. Teddy rolled his eyes in silent ridicule as Albus fixed Scorpius with fierce, glinting eyes.

Once they'd finished sending off letters, Scorpius seemed so much at a loss as to what to do with himself that he went back to bed.

Teddy sank onto the sofa. "It'll be fun if we get to steal some interesting things," he said.

"Oh God, I forgot," said Albus in disgust. "You like history. This is just an excuse to take particularly interesting museum trips, isn't it?"

"So what if it is? You can do the dashing, risk-taking part, Scorpius can do the clever logistical part, and I'll do the enjoying part."

Albus revolved once on the heel of his boot, then stamped.

"None of us are doing anything yet. Probably it'll all come to nothing like the rest of your ideas."

"My ideas don't come to nothing," Teddy explained. "They usually just go so badly I never tell anyone about it." Most of Teddy's great ideas had to do with love, as a matter of fact, and they certainly never went very well.

"Well that's a comfort!" Albus span round again, glanced towards Scorpius's door, and went off to see Clarissa Mayden.

Clarissa had, like Albus and Scorpius, been considering her career options. She'd decided that it was perfectly possible to do the old-fashioned thing as a witch of "good family": marry a wizard of even better family and live a luxurious life of married lady-ness. Even her mother had told her crossly that the world wasn't one bit like that anymore, but Clarissa was determined to prove everybody wrong. Albus was keeping himself amused by flatly refusing to use his "connections" and introduce her to useful people.

*

That evening they received an owl from one of their letter recipients. A Mr Henry Lucy, who would like to meet "Mr Smith, Mr Brown, and Mr Jones" ("It's irony," Teddy had protested at the time of writing, when Albus said wasn't he supposed to have such a vivid imagination.) in a non-wizarding public place to discuss their "interesting offer".

Teddy dashed off a letter agreeing to a meeting, and suggested a coffee house chain in a London suburb near Mr Lucy. Their initial pleasure at having their offer considered interesting was soon dissipated because they managed to get into a row about which of them respectively, should be Mr Smith, Mr Brown, and Mr Jones.

Albus said airily, "So Teddy will be Mr Smith, I'll be Mr Brown, and you can be Mr Jones."

Scorpius took the letter from Teddy, and while peering at it said in a flat voice, "I think I'll be Mr Brown."

Teddy had winced when Albus spoke, because it sounded like he was taking the order in which Teddy had written the names as a figurative one, two, three, and look who was number three.

"No," said Albus, momentarily taken aback but then determined. "I'll be Mr Brown. I've got a natural inclination towards it and it's important that I can respond to my name."

"It's not at all important," said Teddy. "They're just convenient pseudonyms."

"Why shouldn't I have a natural inclination for Mr Brown?" Scorpius asked, still flatly, still engrossed in the letter.

"It was obviously more important to me," said Albus, "Because I spoke first."

"Like anybody else could speak with you around," Scorpius said, his usual closed-off expression replaced by the look of a child telling a whopper.

Albus's eyes opened wide at the image of Scorpius trying to speak but forever being cut off, and found it too ludicrous to actually take issue with, when you considered that Albus spent a great deal of his admittedly considerable talking time trying to drag a response out of Scorpius.

"Look," said Teddy. "If you like, Scorpius, you can be Mr Smith and I'll be Mr Jones."

Scorpius laid the letter aside. "I don't see why you should get your way on everything."

"I said you could-" started Teddy.

"You're just rearranging things so he can have his own way. I'm not that fucking hung up on who is fucking Mr Jones, it's just the way what you say goes." The last words were howled as Scorpius stood up without seeming to mean to. He almost sat down again, but instead went off to his room, slamming the door behind him.

"Oh, well done," said Teddy.

"It is well done! He's never screamed before, he just blanks me. And I'm not going to put up with it now we're bloody living together."

"He could just walk out," Teddy said, though somehow he didn't think Scorpius would do that. He could envisage a lot more screaming in the near future, though, and he wasn't sure whether he was glad or apprehensive.

"And, look what he got cross about!" Albus said. "Maybe he's getting tired of being invisible."

*

Midmorning the next day they were sitting in a coffee house with not only Henry Lucy, but Katy Lucy, his wife. They were a gloomy, intense couple in their fifties, both still dark and good-looking.

There was not enough justice to go round in this imperfect world of ours, and Albus still held the title of Mr Brown. Scorpius was Mr Smith, and Teddy was Mr Jones. This was unfortunate, because "Mr Smith" was the one who'd actually written to the Lucys, and therefore it was to him that they kept addressing themselves. Scorpius, however, smiled nicely and otherwise blanked them.

"There's a woman called Estrilda Morlan," said Katy Lucy at last, as she gave up on Scorpius, and addressed the three of them at once. "And she owns the most beautiful ruby necklace. Truly beautiful. You never saw rubies more like blood. Now, this necklace was in a shop and we – Henry and I – were in this shop, and so was Estrilda Morlan. Henry and I were looking at the necklace and oh, I can't tell you how deeply I'd fallen in love with it. We really couldn't afford it, and I was almost in tears because I couldn't bear to leave it. Henry said-"

She paused for a moment. Her austere face was a little at odds with her way of speaking. Her nostrils merely flared at this point, but one felt she was crying inside.

"-that we should soon have been married for twenty years, and who knew what might not be done to mark that. So I knew he meant to buy it for me-"

"-beg borrow or steal," said Henry in unison with her. "I went back to the shop and the necklace had been sold. Miss Morlan had bought it not ten minutes after we'd left the place. The man in the shop had overheard us, and demurred when she approached him. But she offered well above the asking price. She heard as well, of course, that's why she bought it. It was knowing that somebody wanted it so badly that made it worth having. But to me that necklace represented my heart. And my heart belongs to my wife," Henry said with an air of finality.

With questioning it emerged that the Lucys had begged Miss Morlan to sell them the necklace, and been refused. They'd even offered her mirrors from Henry's marvellous collection, which they'd been determined never to sacrifice, if it meant starving. And of course, they'd tried to steal the necklace themselves, and they could tell them that, when Estrilda wasn't wearing it, she kept it in a box on her dressing table. Now, one could open the box, but an invisible force meant one could not touch the necklace or remove the box.

"Or the dressing table," added Katy.

"We shall see what we can do," Teddy declared, having obtained Miss Morlan's address, and the promise of the necklace's original price, plus one of Henry's mirrors.

The task was pretty simple – much like a practical Charms exam – as long as they could work out the puzzle. For the next week or so they all charged off to Estrilda Morlan's house every time she went out, more specifically to her bedroom. The state of affairs vis a vis the necklace was just as they'd been informed. They alternated between diagnostic spells, to try to work out the spellwork that had been used, and random attacking and unsealing spells, none of which had any result.

Often they had a wasted journey, because one thing that could be said for Miss Morlan was that she got her money's worth out of that necklace. It wasn't really daytime jewellery, yet she'd frequently pop out in the afternoon wearing it, for an outing that seemed most probably to be shopping.

She was a blonde woman in her late forties with a face sharp not exactly of feature but of expression. Teddy inadvertently made up a whole personality for her, one he found harder than ever to believe wasn't mostly true. A brutally curbed heart allowed to grasp only at odd symbols plucked from the flotsam and jetsam of life. He supposed she did her fair share of mooning over the blood-like rubies. (Really. The woman looked like she'd had her throat cut when she wore the thing.) Or perhaps for her they were flames. Or her own treasured pain, kept close and worn as a trophy in disguise. Teddy had an essay writing mind; life filtered into his head through the cracks in Teddy's abstraction, and swiftly resolved itself into prancing, troublesome spirits charging around in the form of symbols, recurring motifs, themes, comparisons and meanings.

While Teddy occupied himself with this aspect of the task, Albus and Scorpius got on with the practical Charms exam side of things. All the problem solving, research and experimentation were very much like homework, so it was fortunate that they both had a proven ability to absorb themselves in homework. However, it was unfortunate that Albus thought of it, like homework, as a competitive sport. Or at least, he did on one level, because the real task at Albus's hand was to break through the plate glass surrounding Scorpius. He felt the best way to do this was to involve him in blazing rows. Scorpius had probably simmered his way through a great deal of Albus's provocation in their schooldays, but had never let it out. Now Albus pushed harder, and that combined with the fact that they were adults now, so that Scorpius could not, in keeping with basic dignity, allow himself to put up with it any longer.

There was indeed a lot of screaming – "How dare you, how dare you!" mostly. Scorpius would often storm in the direction of his room, but Albus would dance round him, cut him off, and herd him back. He wouldn't let either of them out of rowing mode, exactly, but the content of the conversation would become more reasonable and less like storming out fodder. So that Scorpius would end up talking to Albus (and Teddy, when he remembered to take a part rather than observe, or wasn't simply off in his own world) almost like a normal person.

Teddy was touched by Albus because he'd obviously worked out that a part of What Was Up With Scorpius was just terrible self-consciousness, not some great desire to be difficult and personally obstruct Albus. And he wanted to get Scorpius out of himself because it loked like it would have to be done for him if it was to be done at all, and who else was going to do it? Albus wouldn't let Scorpius get comfortable, and bawled him out on the slightest pretext as an empty automaton, a coward, a can't-be-bothered-with-people cold-heart. Scorpius was abruptly tipped out of his shell, and sometimes, when forced into defending himself, he ended up telling the truth-

"I'm shy, alright?" he yelled in desperation. "I can't talk because I don't know what to say or when to say it."

"Well, you can get over it," said Albus. Because I want to talk to you about (whatever it might be)"

"I can't talk," Scorpius repeated. But of course, there he was, talking.

And it was as if a switch had been flicked so that Scorpius was set in the talking position. At first it was only for short bursts, then Scorpius's brain seemed to process Albus and Teddy as people he spoke to, people he was too familiar with to be shy, in the same way it wasn't possible for him to be shy with his own family. Sometimes he seemed almost faint with relief.

*

Teddy's whole scheme had been about creating (in his own way. He liked the idea of creating events where without him there would have been nothing.) and he liked the idea that it had created the opportunity for Albus's own. He was glad for Scorpius's sake that he'd made that silly suggestion to a random schoolboy. While all the shouting and pain and embarrassment and aggression was going on, Teddy smugly thought of the connections growing between the three of them like young green shoots. Human connections were little casual self-seeking things like this, and so much of life was about holding onto them and the people you had them with, making of them little household idols to guide you, someone to please, someone to owe, who could help when no one else could. That was all the transformative power of love was, thought Teddy, when through some decision of your own, or some coincidence, you let someone become part of your life.

Then Teddy had to come out of that to actually connect a bit more, because by then the other two were having lively amicable conversations on occasion, and doing that thing of forgetting Teddy was entirely real.

Scorpius did seem pleased enough when Teddy poked his head up. When Teddy embarked on one of his long, wandering stretches of speech, Scorpius would get the indulgent look on his face that reminded him of some of his girlfriends, the ones who hadn't lasted as long as those who looked amused or patronising. Teddy had in fact become a little wary of people who found him endearing. From his grandmother on, it seemed the reaction followed most swiftly by irritation. Not that Scorpius showed any sign of impatience. Teddy thought, with an odd sense of imposition, that this was probably due to an awareness of his own flaws. Sometimes he tried to be less silly around Scorpius, because it wasn't fair for Scorpius to feel he had to put up with people in return for being put up with, when Scorpius wasn't difficult to put up with. Not these days, when you could usually get a straight answer to a simple question out of him.

*

They were taking far too long on their first job. They'd already received a query from someone else, and been relieved when it was swiftly followed by a note saying the matter could not be pursued for a few weeks.

"Look, sometimes an unbreakable charm is unbreakable. It probably works like the combination to a safe, only there are some charms that don't work if you're not the original caster, even if you know the combination. But," said Albus. "We can't fall at the first bloody hurdle. So what shall we do?"

Teddy thought. He felt that the threads of fate were dangling in just the right place to be woven into just the right garment to cloak the lives of all those involved. Their first hurdle had already served to sort Scorpius out somewhat, and now there were the Lucys, and Estrilda Morlan. Teddy was sure there was a way to serve all three by the same action. However things fell out, he felt that the sting in this theft must be missing.

It didn't suit Teddy to snatch Estrilda's rubies. He wasn't quite sure when he began to think of them as the last few bitter drops of blood in her heart, but there it was. He felt she would be much healthier and happier without them, but at the same time that snatching them would effectively staunch the flow of fresh blood. Teddy tried to explain everything, but got bogged down in blood transfusion metaphors, and Albus and Scorpius entirely failed to see what Estrilda's heart had to do with anything.

"My point is, I think the right thing is less to bash through the obstacle than to find a way to sidestep it. If only we could just tell her to buy emeralds instead. I'm sure she'd be happier."

"Well, you're the one who thinks she's crazy. Would it do any good to send her an anonymous letter explaining all about her heart, and telling her to hand over her rubies at such and such a time and place?" asked Scorpius, moved by facetiousness and wistful thinking. He seemed slightly uncomfortable at exposition of Estrilda's lonely emptiness.

"A letter wouldn't work," Teddy said hesitantly. He put great faith in his powers of persuasion, which Albus frequently remarked did indeed do very well considering their non-existence. It was the way he went on so, and you felt that he knew what he meant.

"It would be convenient if I could talk to her, but not as myself. Or as a human being, or even a ghost. More a spirit, something abstract.

"Oh my God," Albus and Scorpius exclaimed.

"You want to play the Ghost of Christmas Past," said Scorpius. In the years after the Second War, childhood exposure to Muggle culture had become mandatory, and A Christmas Carol had stuck rather a chord with Draco

"I could use the Invisibility Cloak!" said Teddy. He was very fond of the Cloak. It seemed to form a common connection between his past and Harry's. The story of their fathers' doomed schooldays was, weirdly enough, his favourite thing about his parents. He liked how that story was echoed in some ways by the best story of all: Harry's seven Hogwarts years. The Cloak figured prominently in both stories, and was therefore a mythical object beyond its status as a Hallow.

Albus's face brightened at the thought of the Cloak, then grew doubtful. To him the Cloak was the slightly anachronistic proof of the exciting stories that had had to be dragged out of his father. The thought of using it made the escapade seem an adventure indeed. But then he felt inhibited from doing as his father had done; he was always being gently told he really mustn't feel as if he ought to live up to Harry's exaggerated reputation.

Teddy and Scorpius however, waved his objections aside. Albus was sent off to visit his mother and came back having whipped the Cloak.

"We'll do it tonight and then we can take it back tomorrow," Teddy said comfortingly. "I'm sure they won't miss it."

Albus reverted to childhood and ran about appearing and disappearing. Scorpius took it and ran it through his fingers.

"The last Hallow," Teddy agreed, and thought solemnly of the nobility of surrendered power.

They spent the afternoon deciding how they would go about things. When Albus had pointed out they weren't getting anywhere and needed to get radical, he'd wanted to get radical, not hang about while Teddy performed a novelty Ghost of Christmas act. But so it was to be, however they quarrelled among themselves.

 

Around midnight, Scorpius and Albus slid about in a bed of damp gravel in the front of Estrilda's house, in a nice suburban Muggle road, faces tilted up to a darkened window. They gazed in what they knew to be Teddy's vicinity, as he crouched on a broomstick outside Estrilda's window, draped in the Invisibility Cloak. He'd wanted to appear in her bedroom, but Scorpius and Albus, being the ones who'd worked on her security charm had insisted that she was not a witch to trifle with at so graspable a distance.

Teddy paused a long while. He could feel impatient eyes boring into him.  
"This isn't being fun," he heard Albus say in a low voice.

"Perhaps we ought to think things through a bit more next time. Anyway, would you rather be doing a real job?" Scorpius asked.

Teddy's fist briefly emerged from the Cloak, clasping his wand as he magically split the windowpane with a loud crack. Jagged chunks of glass fell onto Estrilda's bedroom floor as she sat bolt upright.

Teddy had charmed his voice so that it sounded like it was coming from the inside of the room, instead of by the window. It was also muffled outside the room's confines so as not to reach the neighbours. Albus and Scorpius below could just about hear him.

"I am the story of your abandoned hopes. You accepted that you were separate from other people. All that love and validation that their lives were founded on never found a place in yours, and you grew a shell of glassy hostility. You stole the sand-grains of other people's lives that came your way in the slipstream and coddled them in your shell until they became pearls.

"And while we're on jewellery, let's talk about your rubies. Speaking for myself and yourself, I'm tired of them. I wish you'd fling them out of the window and let them be pinched off the pavement by any passer-by. Think of your heart, Estrilda. I know what's in there, and I know how you fetishize those bloody bits of glass. I know how taking and keeping someone else's love gift is one of the things that gives you that dark little glow that's the only thing you have. If you were prepared to do without that maybe you'd have something normal pumping through your heart instead of a few rattling beads of fermented blood. Nature abhors a vacuum. At least," Teddy said, "buy emeralds. Green is my favourite colour." His voice here was a little wistful. Being a Metamorphmagus led, if you were Teddy, to some thought on colour. Teddy would have liked it if green hair made him look like the attractive variety of merman. But it didn't, and everyone bullied him into a certain shade of cobalt blue he was told was striking.

Estrilda was sat still and upright in bed; Teddy could see her dark form from his odd sideways position at the window. He could hear shallow breathing.

"And don't go pretending I'm not real!" said Teddy as she snatched up her wand and jerked a spell at the room. A violent one, that jolted the room a little and lit it up as if by lightning. It didn't reveal Teddy, invisible outside the window.

"I am all the thoughts you ever had. I've come back to you and I want you to come back to me. I'm sick of you brooding on other people. I want you to think about yourself and the life you could make for yourself. So what if you're nearly fifty?"

"Are you . . . me?" asked Estrilda. It was an odd tone of voice, angry, incredulous, frightened, but also relieved. Hell, who wouldn't want their better self to turn up and rescue them from their meaner, lesser, daily-life self?

"I am the distillation of all the things you could have been and never were. You've been trailing me behind you like the tail of a comet, only of course you never went anywhere. And I've had enough of it. You can throw those rubies away for a start – go on, out of the window, we don't care what happens to them."

 

She didn't even hesitate. Sadly, Teddy never quite saw what she did to the security charm. She opened the box and made a sharp tweaking gesture, muttering something, and tossed the necklace out of the window. It hit Teddy in the forehead, slid down to his knew and fell to the pavement. He heard it hit, and belatedly hoped it wasn't damaged. He assumed Albus or Scorpius picked it up, but wasn't willing to distract himself by looking.

"So what do you want me to do?" asked Estrilda breathlessly, sitting down on her bed.

"You must know the point of my being here isn't to make it all nice and easy for you like that. I just wanted to tell you that your weakest, stupidest self is eating your soul up and it's time the real you turned up to the fight. Fighting isn't easy, but it is living. Reach inside and drag enough of yourself out that the world and you will know you've met eachother. That's all I'm going to tell you," said Teddy, and dived down to street level.

The three of them nodded at eachother and Apparated back home.

"Well," said Teddy. "I hope that was useful for her, and how lovely to have got her to decide she was better of without the necklace all by herself.

"All by herself," snorted Albus.

"It was!" said Teddy. "I tried to say nothing that I don't think she wanted to say herself. It was like ventriloquism, it just came over me."

"You're creepy," said Albus.

"Why do you think you know anything about her?" asked Scorpius, eyebrows drawn together. "It was an odd thing to do."

"I just pretended I was her," said Teddy. "I'm intuitive, everybody says so."

"Maybe it will do her some good," Albus said. "Anyway, we did it!"

"That mirror's worth a bomb, you know," said Scorpius. "Not a bad way to earn a living, it's got to be said."

"Now for our next trick," said Teddy, clapping his hands.

*

This next trick was the appropriation of a packet of documents; letters detailing the decision to ban flying carpets. All very dull, not that the man who wanted them thought so.

"I think that is a nice thing about doing this really. People being passionate about things."

"Why is that nice?" asked Albus.

"I don't mean that it's nice that they are passionate about inanimate objects though I think it is quite sweet in a way. That they're being passionate, I mean. I suppose they were passionate in the Aurors." Teddy became thoughtful. "But it was all very constructive. I like passion to be endearing."

"What you want is a nice girlfriend," Albus said firmly. "If you don't look out you'll end up acquiring some bizarre china dog perversion out of sympathy."

Teddy laughed and protested; "I try!" Albus laughed too and opened his mouth. Don't you start, you're not doing much better."

Albus shut his mouth and scowled. It seemed surprising soft in him that he was keen to have a boyfriend, in a stable love affair kind of way. But he hadn't managed much in the relationship line so far. People just didn't seem to understand him when he said he liked them. His childhood neediness had been subverted into a desire to really engage with people, get in their face. He didn't like just knowing them to speak to. Which was why he'd been so loath to let Scorpius alone. However, because he tried to engage almost everyone he met in more intimate interaction than they were prepared for, people never knew when his behaviour meant he wanted to hang onto them.

What was exciting about the job was that the documents were in the archives at the Ministry of Magic.

"The archives are right at the bottom of the building, aren't they?" asked Scorpius. "It's like Guy Fawkes."

"I hope not," said Teddy. "That didn't end well." Personally he found it interesting, the bits of Muggle culture that had struck the Malfoys' fancy. Sometimes he thought someone should do a study on what aspects of Muggle culture people had been exposed to, what that said about their background, and how it affected them.

"I want this to be dashing and daring," said Albus. "No giving motivational lectures. I'm in this for the thrills."

"No one invited you," Scorpius said, and Teddy wished they would be a bit simpler with one another. Albus couldn't just be grateful that he'd finally dragged Scorpius out of himself. He was too self congratulatory about it, as if it was a conquest, and also a little resentful still that Scorpius had resisted. Scorpius seemed to feel as if Albus was an exciting dose of cod liver oil. He was drawn to him on the principle that to be in his presence was horrible but good for him. He also seemed to feel it was for Albus's good if he was as prickly as possible around him. Sometimes he forgot, and became . . . amiable was probably the best word, though it made him sound like the heroine of an eighteenth century novel. That was more how he was with Teddy. Albus would soon recall him to himself, however.

Teddy decided he didn't want any arduous discussion just now, and suggested they think about it to themselves for a day or two, then see what they came up with.

Albus went out that evening, and Scorpius used the opportunity to make a suggestion. It took Teddy a while to understand it, because it involved negating reality.

"I didn't know you could do that," he said.

"I don't think people like to think about it much. It's not making things not real, because no, you can't do that. You can make something other, though."

Much explanation followed.

"So, it's like we confiscate the Ministry from the world just for a bit? Apart from the documents? So we can't cause any disturbance because there's nothing there?"

"I think so, yes. We won't be real either, we'll have to – confiscate ourselves with the Ministry, otherwise we'd be chucked out like everyone else in there at the time will be. They'll end up on the pavement outside and no one will be able to get in because it won't be there, I don't know whether that'll be physically or not."

"I hope they'll be alright," said Teddy. He hoped he would be alright. He wondered if one of those things that initially looked like good ideas, before one had to concede there was a reason others were squeamish about it.

At this point Albus returned. You could never rely on him to be gone for any length of time because he was oversensitive and prone to falling out with people.

Scorpius explained his ideas, and Teddy's misgivings were swept aside because Albus was all for it.

"I thought you wanted something daring and exciting, not all complicated," Teddy said.

"It is exciting!" Albus and Scorpius exclaimed simultaneously.

"Think how fucking puzzled they're going to be!" said Albus.

"Including your father, doing his important work in the Aurors," said Teddy.

Albus looked at him and said, "Not much point getting all concerned about the Aurors, Teddy. Dad or no Dad, they are the enemy once we start doing this sort of thing."

"It'll take the Ministry weeks to get back to normal," Scorpius said happily. "Bits and pieces of it will keep going off to this other place."

"I've never seen you so excited," said Teddy. "Obviously it takes political rebellion to get you going."

"We're not doing it for the anarchy. We're doing it to steal some very unimportant documents so we get some money. It's just that if we did want to make a gesture of anarchy, this would be fantastic! We're negating the reality of the seat of power! So we might as well make the most of it," explained Albus.

Albus often resembled the bastard lovechild of Harry and Hermione's younger selves. Harry fighting on the side of justice against authority. Hermione perceiving the ingrained prejudice of so many institutions. It was as if he was stuck in a time warp and hadn't caught up to the modern day reality of wizarding society. The society, the forming of which Harry and Hermione had grown up to have rather a lot to do with, and which was now flowing down the other side of the hill, a little too freely if anything.

Teddy remembered Scorpius's family history, and was prepared to believe that the default Malfoy position was fairly anti-Ministry.

On the whole they agreed on their plan of action. Teddy was in the uncharacteristic position of being sure there was a less drastic way to go about things, but he was pleased to be doing magic that was neglected and interesting.

It was a shame that it wasn't his sort of magic. While interesting, it was more technical, less creative. Teddy had always been considered clever, but he was betting with magic that went outwards, to make something new, rather than being all theory. No matter how often Scorpius and Albus said, "It's just like flicking a switch off!" it continued to be little besides sums to Teddy. Still, Scorpius and Albus were getting on quite nicely.

*

Teddy arrived at the Ministry with apprehension and the idea that Albus and Scorpius seemed to know what they were doing, and that they certainly better had. They announced themselves as visitors – Teddy and Albus were familiar faces at the Ministry. Instead of going to visit Harry for whatever reason they might have at eleven o'clock at night – they'd decided the hustle and bustle of the working day proper wasn't ideal – they went down some empty corridor. Each of them got their wand ready and took a moment to get everything clear in their heads.

Then a lot happened at once. Teddy Apparated them into the archives, almost simultaneously summoning the documents they wanted. The first trill of the alarm sounded as he looked wildly around the set of small, shabby, interconnecting rooms before spotting the wodge of paper winging its way to him. Albus grabbed it and placed it in a magical vacuum, so that it would remain real, just to keep it safe and be on the safe side. The vacuum prevented it being spat out like the people, the only other real things that would be left. Then Scorpius, still while the alarm was on its first blare, appeared to conduct a short symphony as he performed the vital spell; it relied more on wandwork than words.

They all collapsed onto the floor as the walls of the archive became transparent, then disappearing so that he could see the corridors and rooms on the same level slowly fade too. He was just in time to glance up and see black sky when it all suddenly reappeared again.

"But it's here, not there," Albus said smugly, performing a shuffling spin with his arms flung out.

"I don't feel different," said Teddy, who of course began to feel different the moment he'd said it. There was a small, central Teddy, lost in a foreign Teddy. There seemed to be suddenly wide spaces inside him. It was like the space you see when you look behind you, stretching behind and between the trees in the distance at twilight. It's the space you've just walked through, yet it isn't; warm and shadowy and much realer than anything in this world. Now it was inside Teddy and he felt lost and frightened. He thought he might have liked it if the twilight zone had confined itself to the archives, but the inside of Teddy – the normal Teddy – was a pretty small place, and if it was to matter at all, he had to be in all of it, being as real as he could be. As a child he'd sometimes found it difficult to believe he was real. It was a good thing he'd never been exposed to Muggle philosophy or he'd probably given up believing this at all and become quite impossible to live with.

Scorpius and Albus were prowling delightedly around the walls, now shadowed differently, as if it were fun. Not thinking this sort of thing was fun had always been the difference between Teddy and people who did drugs, and he was disappointed in them. Albus pulled a sheet of paper towards him – doubtless something important – and wrote on the back, "The bandits of space and time were here! We stole the Ministry! We'll let you have it back – for now." Scorpius seemed to be on the same power kick as Albus, sniggering over his shoulder.

Teddy opened his mouth and felt the cool floor under his chin – he didn't know why he couldn't stand up. He closed it, opened it again, when he caught sight of something coming through the walls. He never got a proper look at it, to his fury. It was ectoplasm, like a ghost, but it didn't have the shape of a person. It was one of those forms that were fascinating, like a squid, though it didn't at all resemble a squid. Getting a proper look at it would have been the only educational thing about the experience, and really, when you enter an alternate plane of existence, you ought to learn something new.

But Albus and Scorpius leapt into action and the entity was obscured as the wall it was passing through became transparent. The archives, and the Ministry above and around them, were real again. The three of them were not, which was why they were able to Disapparate home, Albus clasping the papers.

Teddy sat down at once, took the papers, and melodramatically clutched them. "I suppose that's another nice little earner that won't get anyone looking for us," he said.

"Well, they will be looking for us," said Scorpius. "They'll just think we're the otherworldly bandits of space and time." He paused to breathe a long smooth breath, a little smile on his lips, as if he were happy to be a "we". "They'll have, like the tadpole version of that thing popping up, and corridors coming and going for weeks. And spells will only work on and off."

"God, wish it'd happened when I was there. Would have lightened things up no end," said Teddy. He decided that less was more when it came to weird things being exciting. It was the contrast that made things novel.

*

Over the next few weeks there was a serial story of indignation from Harry and Hermione. Times had changed, and the Ministry was now decidedly a place they liked How It Was. As Scorpius had said, the place was chaos.

*

A year or two passed. Teddy pursued an on-off relationship with Clarissa Mayden, much to Albus's fury. And there was the Revolt of the Things, or the Rebellion of Matter. There was the day every piece of wizard owned silver in the country sang little songs about going on an outing, before most of it managed to break bounds in the night. It all flew to a congregation point in Hertfordshire before marching (sort of) on London, chanting very long slogans to the effect that inanimation was part of LIFE too. No prankster could be discovered, no trace of a spell, and it became widely (and wide-eyed) hypothesised that it actually was the silver, of its own volition. A silver fork was recovered; engraved on the handle were the words, "The dish ran away with the spoon. However much you Obliviate, the Muggles have long memories." After that there was much earnest study of Hey Diddle Diddle. Speaking of Oblivion, a great deal had to be done following that night. They worried about that, and determined that nothing should thereafter happen in the presence of Muggles, but it very often did.

One woman's Stebwinter china hen, which laid red and yellow china eggs, flapped its wings one day and flew about the room. In a hennish voice it cried, "If you don't want clay to be birds, don't form it like them." Over and over again so that its owner shooed it out of the window in fright and irritation, even while asking her friend, "But real hens don't fly, do they?"

"They do in the wild," her friend replied sagely.

"Wild hens? You'll back me up, won't you, if Misuse of Muggle Artefacts comes down on me for that? It never did that before."

At that moment, the red and yellow china eggs began to hatch into real live chicks. Unfortunately, Stebwinter china hens weren't worth quite so much without the eggs.

Then there was a spell where furniture kept transforming into pink elephants which would prance and dance through the streets before becoming prancing dancing pink goats, then cats, and finally pink mice, which would scamper away and disappear.

When there was once a picture in a house they wanted, the house and everything in it was transformed into thousands of brightly coloured little birds, which flew halfway across the country. The flock flew in a certain formation, which recreated the picture, though it could only be observed from above. Then most of the birds became a house again, though some birds flew on, most of them being the birds that were really the picture.

Scorpius phlegmatically adapted to the Rebellion of Matter, but Albus sometimes displayed comic exasperation, exclaiming, "Do you think you're cute, or what?"

Pink elephants are a curious subject for psychoanalysis, but if you were to grasp the nettle, you'd come back to Teddy's childhood. As a child brought up on the fringes of a large, noisy, happy family, by a grieving grandmother in whom he could always detect the effort not to be sombre, it had always seemed as if the fun happened in other peoples' houses. That was fine until it was time for him to go home, while they didn't have to go anywhere. It had left him with a taste for the kind of excitement generated, not by danger, like the kind Albus affected a hankering for, but simply by things happening. And a taste for being the source of it.

Teddy got far too attached to the notion of matter protesting. He got tired of the monotony of humans being at the top of every food chain, and wizards above them, however they might feel about it, and got all "you show 'em" about the elements. He kept forgetting he'd invented it himself, and was disappointed when he remembered it wasn't real. Being an "expert" in the theory was one of the few careers he could imagine having on purpose.

In the collecting world they got to the point of having to arrange their affairs like a matter of knowing where the mines were. They couldn't steal things from people who had previously hired them, and knew exactly what pink elephants were all about. By the time things had reached this state they'd met Harold Nighttime, so it didn't matter much. He'd written to them to say he'd heard they were good at obtaining things, and since kept them pretty well occupied. He operated on behalf of a shadow patron – as a point of interest this patron was a fairly unhinged portrait, a seventeenth century painted lady Harold was in love with. However, the tumultuous story of their love is not this one.

Teddy was happy with this turn of events, because Harold targeted more interesting things than most. Teddy was particularly drawn to the demon raising bone and silver horn thing he stole from a museum. The theft involved minimum fuss. He set up a small jet of wind to blow down the horn, so that it emitted a continual low moaning sound. The connection between the horn and the land of the demons no longer existed. Demon raising had been fashionable when people felt comfortable with the less secular, more unholy forms of magic. Then the demons moved on, to some other plane or sphere, or whatever place it was, like that the Ministry had visited, that they lived in. All objects like the horn were automatically disconnected, and no one had an interest in updating the technology.

Despite having more reason to know this than most as, one would hope, experts in their field, everyone in the museum was unreasonably distressed by the way the bugle was singing like a kettle. Teddy dropped by again, looking less like his usual self and more like a kindly, professional man in his late thirties. Dropping into concerned conversation with the staff, he revealed himself as an expert in magical object disposal. They might have been reluctant to give up hope of having the horn fixed rather than removed, but they weren't especially keen on getting the Ministry in. While they were there, likely as not they'd look the other exhibits over "just to be sure", and these days they were cracking right down on possession of anything even vaguely dark and of dubious provenance.

So Teddy merrily took it home and they all sat in the living room looking at it. Teddy ran his fingers over the worn, cool smooth curve of bone, interrupted by the strips both of silver and lines of carved runes, the indentations filled in with molten silver. He loved old things because they'd seen things he could never quite believe had happened, had once been part of reality. He imagined the unimaginable demons . . . fiends, spirits . . . hearing the bugle ring out across their land.

It was at this moment that Teddy's owl Daisy flew in through the window with a letter. Clarissa (she and Teddy were in one of their off times to which Teddy was hoping to bring an end) had married Lazarus Surleybird, of Flash broomsticks. Teddy stared at Clarissa's facetious words after they blurred and only put the letter down when the tears ran down his face.

"Are you crying?" Albus asked in astonishment. "What is it?"

Teddy handed him the letter. He rose from his chair and almost made for his bedroom, but realised he wanted some kind of comfort. He put his hands over his face and choked a little.

"Wow, she's finally done it," Albus said. He looked up at Teddy in puzzlement. "You don't usually get upset about these things. And why you'd get upset over Clarissa . . . She always said she was waiting for a rich man."

"Teddy's rich," Scorpius put in. All three of them were, though neither Teddy nor Albus knew what good it did them. It wasn't as if they could bring it out to play in any big way without their families wondering where they'd got it.

"He is," Albus agreed. "Clarissa made a mistake there."

"Well, I think it was the swank she wanted," said Scorpius.

"Yes," said Teddy, "but no one thought she'd actually manage it!"

"I thought she would in the end," said Albus, as if being accused of lacking faith in his friend. "Come on, it was never that serious. And you are eight years older."

"I'm twenty-eight!"

"Lazarus Surleybird is thirty-two," said Scorpius.

"I really liked her!" Teddy cried. And he had. She was rather like Victoire; shiny and breezy, shallow in some ways but also bright and sharp. She cheered him up.

"Well I'm sorry if you're upset," Albus said, "but you never seem that concerned about people. You just get on with your own thing."

Teddy was at the stage of anger/upset where he wasn't sure if rage had set in, in lieu of tears, or if a whole new wave of them was about to crash the shore.

"I won't make you feel guilty by telling you how hurt I am you think that," he said, and stalked off to his room.

"He thinks about people all the time," he heard Scorpius say. "That's what he's doing when he's off in his head all the time, he's thinking."

"Exactly," Teddy said round his door as he slammed it.

He was plucked from unfamiliar despair not half an hour later. Albus got bored out in the living room. He didn't like not being on good terms with people and was unsure how or when to approach Teddy with tact. He blew down the bugle long and hard with his own breath, not a conjured jet of air. A distant hullabaloo set up inside the thing that could have been demon hordes speaking in tongues, or static. Teddy was called out to deal with it; he planned to go right back to his room afterwards, but then he got interested and felt he'd mislaid his misery. Which made him wonder if he ought to be deeper and take more of an interest in himself. There wasn't actually anything he could do with the horn; when they'd finished trying various charms and peering cautiously down it they owled Mr Nighttime.

"We can always say it started that up after just the little jet of air I used to get it off the museum," Teddy said, remembering as Albus looked cheered that it was him he was covering.

Harold arrived and underwent the introductions to his bugle with some trepidation. The topic of this trepidation led, as most topics did with Mr Nighttime and Teddy, to that of the romance of theft.

"Your horizons become so much broader when you just take what you want," Scorpius agreed, breezily counting the cash Harold had just given him.

Harold thought the taking ought to be an adventure, like a task from a story. He was happy enough to go with Teddy's method of making a mark with his thefts – making stories out of them – but he could take or leave what was for Teddy an important aspect of the Theft As A Performing Art Approach, the fact that it disguised the absence at the heart of the whole business.

That was the only incentive for Albus to join one of these ramblings on; he too would find it much more romantic if their actions had an overt, rather than covert impact. Both he and Harold had ideas about these kinds of actions being good for society. It was bracing. Albus's father and aunt were involved in, and were rather pleased with, the way wizarding society was going. Albus of course trusted them completely and from childhood had looked at the world about him, expecting it to be therefore perfect, and been puzzled to perceive that it wasn't. So that, at this time in his life, he held a quasi-Marxist set of views as the intelligent, well brought up, reasonably well meaning, odder-way-of-going-about-things-than-was-noticed-when-compared-with-Teddy version of thinking things would improve if given a good hiding.

Scorpius didn't say much. That was less because he felt unable to speak than because he was in it for the money, rather than love, or an opportunity to let his personal theories and talents out for exercise. Teddy felt his gaze rest upon him every now and then, studying him with concern. He smiled at him, grateful for some warmth after the rampant lack of empathy earlier.

*

Over the next few days Teddy grew very irritated by Albus and Scorpius's air of "Sorree, we didn't know you cared about these things." It made him wonder just how distant he seemed to people. He didn't feel that distant, and it upset him that some people seemed to imagine him as sitting in the next room, needing only to be yelled out to occasionally. Teddy was pulled out of the pit of "Why does no one ever want me and only me?" when Harold came up with another request.

He wanted a daydream machine. Now these, like demon summoners, were something that technology had forgotten how to do, though they were from a much later period, being seventeenth-century. Being a machine, it worked differently to the WWW Patented Daydream Charms, which basically charmed you. Not enough people had had a look at a daydream machine for their workings to be common knowledge, but it was supposed to be a much more convenient way of doing things, and to allow for more variety. Only their inventor had known how to make them, and then he died. There were nineteen daydream machines in Britain and apparently only two were suitable for Harold's (or his patron's) purposes. One of these machines belonged to a Professor Listlethwaite, and the funny thing about that was that Albus's cousin Rose worked for him.

There were several things known about Professor Listlethwaite. He was reclusive and inaccessible, albeit a recluse who talked to the newspapers on a daily basis. People knew who he was, or at least those people who read the better class of newspaper. People knew he was important – he constantly trumpeted about his super secret progressive ideas and how they endangered him. So if he hadn't attracted fanatics and cranks convinced they ought to make themselves a danger to him before, he did now. However, nobody knew exactly what it was he did and what it was all about.

Although presumably Rose did. She was his secretary and assistant. She'd heard about him through Hermione, who had ideas about what it was he did, and would have loved to know, one way or the other. Rose wrote to him with her record breaking NEWT results and a letter she'd written over and over, each draft rising to a new level of serious mindedness. She'd also made many assurances of her understanding of the need for the utmost confidentiality, and her ability to meet those high standards. Much to Hermione's pride, Rose was hired, though it was rather a Catch-22 situation that she herself was no better informed.

According to Harold, the daydream machine was kept in a safe. It was fairly certain that Rose would know the combination; Listlethwaite was very keen on loading her with responsibilities "in case anything should happen."

"How convenient is that," Scorpius exclaimed. "We just need to imperio Rose!" Albus drew back and raised his eyebrows at him. "Or we can give her Veritaserum!" Scorpius added, remembering that he wasn't at home.

"Yes. We just need to give her some Veritaserum, ask her for the combination, then we can Obliviate her," Teddy said, poking at some boxes of potions ingredients on the table.

"You can't Obliviate her," Albus said, as if in disbelief at needing to explain something. "It'll damage her. It leaves people confused."

"Only for a day or two," Teddy said. "We do do it to Muggles all the time, come on, it's nothing major."

"Well I don't think we should do it to Muggles all the time, or think about it that way. It's against her human dignity. We can't possibly do it to someone we know."

They came to an impasse and sat staring, willing one another to see their side.

Scorpius said, "Look, I'm sure your morals are very enviable and everything, but – it's the convenient thing, and it's nothing to make such a big fuss about. Can't you just not mind about it this once?"

"It's not going to be an issue another time. It's this time I'm worried about. It's not just that it's wrong to give people Veritaserum and Obliviate them just because you want to know something in order to commit a crime. This is Rose. Her job means a lot to her. She'd be mortified to be used against Listlethwaite."

"I think you're not looking at it like you normally would because she's your cousin," Scorpius said.

"Of course, because she is my fucking cousin!" He turned to Teddy. "Teddy, come on, you must see this from my point of view. You can't be ready to treat Rose like that."

Teddy froze. Being part of the Potter-Weasley extended family had always been precious to him. He'd accepted that he couldn't choose to be entirely of that family, and reject the gloom of dead parents, a doing-her-best grandmother, and beyond them, the ghastly Blacks. However, he'd always felt secure in the share he did have in that family, and now out of the blue came a real chance of jeopardiding it. There was obviously no good way of saying couldn't they all decide not to worry about it not being very nice.

"Emotional blackmail," Scorpius said. "How can he admit to not being moved by all this "Think of Rose!" talk? Whatever we decide, he'll know you're looking at him coldly and thinking "You don't love Rose the way you ought.""

"Too right I bloody well will!" Albus said, his mouth twisting to admit the charge of emotional blackmail.

"We'll do something else if you really think it's too much," Teddy said haltingly.

"You made him say that," said Scorpius.

"It's not about me," Albus said. "And you," – to Scorpius – "you haven't got the nerve to argue your own case in an argument so stop doing that thing you do."

Scorpius flushed and glared. In an argument Scorpius felt that it looked more natural to take a part in it rather than to sit silent and straight faced as if trying to pretend it wasn't happening. The problem was that he didn't quite have the courage to be aggressive about his own view, so would resort to supporting whoever seemed to be coming off worse. This was due less to natural concern for the underdog than to his father. Draco, thinking of his early life, made it a sardonic rule of thumb always to be on the side of the oppressed. "Because the meek probably will go and inherit the bloody earth," he would say. Then he would look at Scorpius and want to add, "And so will you!"

"So what if we give Listlethwaite Veritaserum?" asked Teddy.

"I thought you said we could do something else."

"I didn't mean –"

"Oh. Right. I feel uncomfortable about targeting Listlethwaite at all, to be honest. It's just too close to home." He looked glumly at Teddy and Scorpius's self-conscious faces. "Let's just leave it a few days and have a think, eh?"

The others readily agreed. The atmosphere remained pretty sticky. Albus obviously wanted them to be better, and wasn't quite sure he could deal with their lack of moral fibre. Teddy and Scorpius felt uncomfortably aware both of their failure in integrity and their lack of ability to correct same with any genuineness.

Teddy felt odd. He wasn't always sure that he shouldn't try harder at himself, but could never work out exactly what it was he ought to improve in. He'd never worried that he wasn't keeping his end up in the nice, decent person stakes, though. Teddy knew perfectly well that he never meant anyone any harm. But it occurred to Teddy that he did find it difficult to believe that the universe, or God, or . . . Abstract Fact didn't understand. That when he couldn't bring himself not to do something, because it was so convenient for him, if . . . inconvenient for other parties, Life wasn't right there with him agreeing that the other thing would have been too hard. He couldn't make himself believe that Life expected too much of him. It was only when Teddy began to do his thinking about other people thing in a more daily life context that it struck him that Life didn't seem to make many exceptions for them, nor did they seem to expect it.

Then a horrible suspicion dawned on him that he himself had no special understanding with Life either, and that this was a whole new dimension to adulthood he'd got this far without discovering. Now that he had he didn't see how he could avoid the painful prospect of incorporating it. Teddy didn't feel he could share this with Scorpius or Albus because he had a feeling they'd know it already, and they were younger than him.

Teddy didn't mention the daydream machine, or Professor Listlethwaite, or Rose. He was embarrassed at having let himself down in front of Albus. It was alright for Scorpius, he was a Malfoy for goodness' sake.

*

Two days later Listlethwaite appeared in the press. He wished to inform the general public that he had received a letter, which warned him of danger posed to his assistant because of her knowledge of his security measures. He could not, in all conscience, countenance that, so he wanted to broadcast the fact that he had changed all his passwords and, sadly, no longer felt able to share that aspect of his burden with Miss Weasley.

Teddy didn't read about it in the papers but heard about it from an anxious Hermione. He was coldly furious, which was both new for him in general, and a sharp contrast to the preceding mood theme. Scorpius was coldly furious too, so they neatly managed to be at loggerheads with Albus in much the same way as before, each side finding the other's attitude an unpleasant surprise.

"It's nice you had so little respect for or confidence in us you took action against us with absolutely no further discussion," said Teddy.

"It wouldn't have been so bad if you'd told us about it," Scorpius said. "We live together. We can't really manage that if you find us so horrifying."

"Not horrifying – I mean, I spend most of my time trying to make you let me be a dashing thief, while you're all about the pink elephants. I'm not trying to get on my moral high horse here, I just wanted to put it right to bed. I think anything to do with Listlethwaite would just have been too close to home."

"You're missing the point. You didn't trust us to make the right decision," Teddy emphasized.

"Well, no. Because you didn't," Albus said in bemusement.

"Teddy wanted another crack at it. He doesn't like letting people down and you stopped the watch before he was ready."

"Well, Teddy can bloody take responsibility for his own ethics. He can learn to demand more of himself than whatever people will expect."

"You didn't let me take responsibility for my own ethics!"

"Exactly," said Scorpius. "You took away his right to an informed decision. And mine. It was patronising."

"Patronage is better than perdition," Albus declared, and Teddy got bored and went to visit a friend. For a moment there it had been quite exciting with both him and Scorpius unusually angry. Well, Scorpius got sort of angry all the time, when Albus set on him and verbally prodded and poked until he got a reaction. Organically angry was new. But most of Albus and Scorpius's conversations ended in saying brutally honest things just for the thrill of saying them into the air. For Scorpius, of course, saying words into the air was such a thrill there seemed little point in censoring them. That was all very well, but if that was your usual method of interaction, Teddy thought it frivolous to slide into it as they were beginning to when you actually had something important to discuss. Also, Teddy didn't know where they got off being brutally honest about him.

*

When he got back, Albus was out. Scorpius claimed they'd come to an agreement to put the matter behind him. Teddy was relieved, but wondered how long that would last. Albus always wanted to be generous about grudges, but his flesh was weak, and he would end up returning to things over and over.

Teddy was enjoying the relief of respite when Victoire suddenly swirled out of the fireplace. Teddy sat up; she looked absolutely spitting. That was quite rare for Victoire; she could be intimidating without losing her temper.

"I visited Rose at her workplace today," she said. Teddy didn't like where this was going. Scorpius, who'd been lying on the sofa, struggled into an upright position.

"I was in her office. And crumpled up under the leg of her desk was this anonymous letter I'm sure you've heard about. Now, it seems Rose didn't but I recognised Albus's handwriting when I saw it."

Victoire glared at Teddy like a bull about to charge. "What one asks oneself is this: how did Albus know about this? And some interesting answers occur to one." Another pause. "In fact, some appalling possibilities occur to one."

Another "one", Teddy thought, and he'd be justified in passing comment. God knew he couldn't think of anything else to say. If only he'd had warning, he might have been able to get into the spirit of all the things he'd need to say to convince her she'd got the wrong end of the stick. Anything he came up with now would be the sort of lying that depended on front, and he didn't have any. Albus, now if Albus had been here – actually, no, he didn't have much front either. God, they were all three of them useless.

"I am shocked to the marrow that this letter was thought necessary. I cannot believe that you thought of treating Rose like that."

Teddy was about to protest that it hadn't just been him, but then he remembered that Scorpius was a Malfoy, and quite incapable of distressing Victoire with his morals.

Teddy sat huddled, staring distantly into Victoire's mouth, opening and closing with emphatic enunciation. Not that this distracted from the audio version. She went on for some time. She hadn't got it quite right; Veritaserum didn't seem to occur to her. Imperius was what she harped on, never coming right out with it but treating it like an unmentionable horror. Teddy didn't correct her. For a start it would be much easier for them to forget about this and get back to normal if he admitted and explained nothing. For another, he was burning with shame. When Scorpius had suggested Imperius, he remembered accepting it for a moment.

Scorpius was not wading in on Teddy's behalf, which was what he would have done if Victoire had been most other people. He was always a little strange with Victoire, though. When Scorpius was in the presence of People He Didn't Talk To, while with People He Did Talk To, he would, involuntarily, end up speaking. It felt too unnatural suddenly to assume the mute position. With Victoire, however, the mute position it was. He did look at her a lot. Teddy didn't think Scorpius fancied her, but then God knew how he'd tell.

Teddy recoiled like a slug plied with salt when Victoire, waving her arms like a flamenco dancer which always indicated she was wrapping things up, demanded, "How would the Professor know Rose wasn't acting of her own volition?" Another thing he hadn't thought of in their admittedly brief discussion.

"Don't think I ever saw why the supplying business suddenly needed two extra people," she snapped as she left.

"She's not going to actually do anything or tell anyone," Scorpius reassured Teddy. "She just wanted to vent her disappointment with you." Teddy hadn't even considered the possibility; Victoire was very loyal.

Albus came back a couple of hours later, and felt suitably shocked and exposed that Victoire knew all.

"She doesn't exactly know all," Scorpius said, trying to settle them. "She just always thought we were up to something dodgy. And then when she saw your note she didn't think, "Maybe that is another dodgy thing entirely Albus just happened to hear about."

Teddy was conscious of feeling a little cold towards Scorpius. He was untouched by Victoire's disapprobation. One didn't really get the impression that he particularly tried or wanted to be a nice human being. Teddy suspected he'd most like to be "like everybody else." It was just luck that he wasn't too awful, given the lack of maintenance. It meant that he wasn't distressed by any failure in that direction, because he didn't expect much from himself.

Teddy was similarly aware of a contrite warmth towards Albus. He had known better, and if Teddy had known better too he would have been saved Victoire thinking badly of him.

It wasn't until late that night that they got onto the subject of the daydream machine. Or rather, the other machine. Teddy was slightly surprised to find that Albus was all for going after it. Especially because this one was in Gringotts bank. He'd dismissed the prospect of breaking in there out of hand, himself, and in his slightly depressed state he felt even less like coming up with some kind of strategy. But what attracted Albus was the near-impossibility of it, or at least the thought of afterwards being the sort of person who'd achieved the near impossible. To attain that, he was prepared to muddle through the near-impossible bit somehow.

"Oh, come on, Albus. You shouldn't be falling for that. Think how Harry's always saying what a boring, ordinary person he is really, and what's more, think how he is."

"Maybe Dad is boring," Albus yelled. "But I'm not!" He stomped off to bed. Ignoring Scorpius, who was trying to say something. Teddy hated the way everything had gone all difficult and horrible lately.

In the morning it turned out that what Scorpius wanted to say was an expression of his flat disinclination for robbing banks. Teddy and Albus were a little nonplussed by this. Scorpius was where he was because, on a random impulse, he'd taken up a random offer. He didn't have any deep-seated interest in stealing things, therefore he was usually co-operative and neutral when it came to decision making.

"Gringotts is too much," he said.

"Too much?" asked Albus incredulously. "Oh, I am sick of people saying that! I want this whole thing to be about doing things that are too much."

"I'm not a daredevil," Scorpius continued. "I don't think doing dangerous things are fun. I agreed to go into this – well, this sort of career option with you, and when I did that I took a certain amount of "Might be caught" into account. But Gringotts goes over my limit." He raised his voice as Albus tried to butt in. "Not only is it out of my comfort zone, but I think this is the place where it could all go horribly wrong. I don't want any of us to do it."

Teddy was always touched when Scorpius admitted affection for them in any form. He knew he did like them without that admission, because him being here was admission enough. But still.

Albus usually noticed and crowed over the tiniest thing of that kind, but not today. "It might be immature, but I want to do something exciting. I know it might go horribly wrong, but it won't until it does. I want to dare, and consequences are the price of daring. And I don't want to turn down a job and say "Oh, we can't do this.""

Teddy remembered the short period of time Albus had been a sweet, timid, insecure child. Sometimes it seemed like it would be best if people didn't work out exactly what they wanted to do with their life.

Anyway, Teddy remembered with increased irritation; "You invited yourself on my endeavour. If you wanted to do exactly what you wanted to do, you should have had your own time to do it on."

The three of them sat and stared crossly ahead of them for a while. Teddy thought about that lovely unfolding feeling of interested pleasure he'd had when Mr Nighttime told them he wanted a daydream machine. Everything would be fine if only the bloody thing wasn't in Gringotts, or if Gringotts was just a bit easier. He imagined turning that place into birds, lock stock and barrel. He wouldn't turn them into blood and bone feathered birds this time. There'd be millions of white marble birds, dank stone birds, shining wooden birds, and glinting in their midst there'd be the birds made from gold and jewels. And he'd have the marble birds more like pterodactyls than anything else, with heavy, dangerous wings. Albus ought to like that with his ideas about theft as a statement on society – Gringotts taking off into the air, leaving behind a hole in the ground.

The problem was that that was not remotely possible. As Harry, Ron and Hermione kept telling them, Gringotts was a damn sight harder to break into than it was when they'd done it. After the wars they'd been a lot of dark wizards on the run, desperate to access their gold, not to mention a host of other people who for one reason or another thought they had a right to gold connected to the Dark side. The dragons (in part due to Hermione) had eventually been removed and replaced with a battery of security spells, some of which had the effect of making all Unforgivables impracticable within the bank's confines.

Teddy was frightened of Gringotts. He had a block, he decided unhappily. He'd hated the place as a child, with its goblins (who had rights now, as they kept reminding you, and people kept drearily reminding each other) and draughty labyrinths. He'd always been told what a vivid imagination he had, and through all the thefts he'd committed so far, he'd tried to sidestep anything that might be the expected way of doing things. But now Teddy couldn't think of anything usual that might work on Gringotts, let alone anything unusual. It was such a shame that the inevitable too-difficult assignment should have fallen on one of the objects Teddy most wanted a good look at.

"I know you won't care," said Scorpius, "but my father's tried very hard to regain some respectability, and I'm not throwing it away on doing something I have no confidence in."

As might have been expected, Albus went on a rant about respectability. The gist was that the Potters had a reputation far beyond mere respectability, so if Albus wasn't puling and whining about it, he couldn't imagine why Scorpius was acting as if anything the Malfoys had was too precious to risk.

"We are more aware of having to work hard," Scorpius said, with the air of being both furious and genuinely wanting to explain. "People who aren't the children of heroes might feel more need to bring good to the family table, not bad. Before, I've always felt that I was making money, and we probably wouldn't get caught. I can't, in good faith, take on something I think will fail from the off. It's bad luck."

"That's what I feel," said Teddy, latching onto the bad luck part. "I know when I can push my luck and when I can't. Sometimes you have to accept the pressure of outside circumstance."

"But it's a failure!" Albus cried, aghast at uttering the word "failure."

"Gringotts doesn't like me," said Teddy, a little weakly, he had to admit.

"Why are people so fucking defeatist?" Albus demanded. He stood in front of them, arms raised, before deciding they were too irritating to be borne right now. He physically marched out of the flat, leaving the echoing sound of the slammed door behind him.

Teddy sat back. He wanted to be one of the daring with Albus, one of the people who went out and robbed impenetrable banks, and managed it when no one else could have done it, but . . . That sort of thing didn't work when you knew better, and once you knew better you couldn't affect that foolish undauntedness that sometimes opened doors nothing else could. Knowing better wasn't usually one of Teddy's problems. He shared an unhappy look with Scorpius, for whom it was.

 

Teddy was in his room boiling up some frog spawn on the little stove he had in there when he became briefly aware of much clatter and clamour out in the living room. Scorpius pulled his door open.

"Come here – now."

Albus was back, holding something like a small silver stand. One daydream machine, Teddy realised after some moments.

"I've left my shoe behind," Albus said, his legs grasshopper-ing as he circuited the room. "It's eleven past."

"Oh my God." Teddy knew what he was talking about, thanks to his time in the Aurors department. "We must get it back. How did you-"

"Do you mean you've been caught?" Scorpius asked, all staring and still.

Albus grabbed Teddy's arm and tried to hold onto Scorpius's wrist with the same hand while taking his wand out of his pocket. He made a wide sweeping gesture with it, followed by a series of little squiggles. He murmured a few words, holding onto Scorpius as he twisted his arm and began to ask something. Then all three of them suddenly began to bowl along, feet running on the floor, but only because they seemed to be propelled forward by a pressure behind them. Albus threw the daydream machine clear just as Teddy thought they must smack into the wall.

Only then they were in something like a chasm, a small crack between two massive lips of stone, stretching up as far as the eye could follow. There was a very faint whistling sound near them and Teddy and Albus both ducked, pulling Scorpius with them. They scrambled forward on their knees as the whistling seemed to follow them. There was a cold wind just above their heads to accompany it, and then it and the whistle passed over them to carry on down the crack. That was one of the security charms teddy knew about; a beam of wind that tackled you if it sensed you, pulling until it had captured an item of clothing or a hair. When one of them had caught something, it showed up on a machine in the Aurors' department, which was checked on the half hour. This beam could scan the item it'd caught and come up with the owner's name and present whereabouts.

Albus's shoe lay a little ahead of them. Albus darted to pick it up with the tips of his fingers; neither he nor Teddy were sure how it worked – whether the beam of wind was lurking, the shoe in its clutches, or whether its work was done once it caught and scanned the thing. They couldn't really ascertain the answer; Albus had to yank at his shoes as if it was caught in toffee, but no chill breeze leapt out at him, as it were. Teddy and Scorpius were nearer the shoe retrieval end of things than they would have liked. When Albus moved forwards they trundled after him, again with that feeling of pressure from behind.

When Albus had a firm grip on his shoe, he clutched Teddy and Scorpius and did the same spell. This time they careered down the chasm for quite a way, so that Teddy worried about catching up with the beam of wind – or being found by another.

But no, for here they were back at home. They all collapsed, Scorpius into an armchair, Teddy and Albus onto the sofa. Albus began to put his shoe on but hesitated, undecided. He usually took his shoes off inside.

Teddy could feel his heart pounding painfully inside him. "I hope to god that worked," he said.

"I think it probably did," Albus said in a determined tone. He shrugged. "I'll soon know if it didn't." He stared across the room, a smile creeping across his face. "Got the machine."

Teddy laughed, more out of surprise than anything. "I don't understand how you-"

"And why exactly were we dragged along for that?" Scorpius asked, thin and icy.

Albus looked nonplussed. "Well, I suppose I didn't actually need you, now I come to think of it. But Teddy volunteered and I brought you along automatically. I'm used to doing things as a three."

"Remember why you weren't doing it as a three? Because Teddy and – well, I" – Scorpius's inability to rest on anything that could be retracted kicked in – "said it was a stupid fucking idea. If you're so hung up on teamwork, that was your cue not to do it."

"No it wasn't, because I managed it," Albus said, jerking his head across the room. "If you'd been more supportive and come with me the first time I might not have lost my shoe."

"I wish you hadn't got the bloody thing, because it was a complete coincidence. It's probably mislead you for life and now you'll never learn when you should and shouldn't do things."

"You're being completely illogical," said Albus, half laughing in disbelief. "When your job is stealing things for money, how can it be a time when you "shouldn't do something" when you try to steal something and then succeed? I'm not going to push it but I was right all along."

"I cannot bear your arrogance," said Scorpius, slightly paler than normal. "Actually, I can't bear you. You don't care about anything as long as you get to do what you want, and then you've got to be "right all along." You shouldn't have risked yourself and you had absolutely no right to involve us when you knew we – we were against it."

"It's nice to know your only interest in what just happened is what I had the right to ask of you. No actual concern or anything in there, despite our disagreement, that I might end up in Azkaban. Maybe people doing things you think are unwise wouldn't upset you so much if you weren't such a fucking, fucking coward who's never dared anything in your life. You don't care about anyone or anything, all you have is fear."

"I don't think you should have done it either," said Teddy. He didn't know what side to be on. He hated it when people were horrible to each other. On the whole he agreed with Scorpius, but he could see Albus was upset, thinking –

"You'd be quite happy to feed me to fucking Azkaban, if I didn't do what you think I ought."

"That's not quite what I – Oh, you're just being stupid. I always thought you were stupid."

"We all have our weaknesses. Can't we just accept them?" asked Teddy, who wasn't fool enough to expect them to come to an out and out agreement.

"I am not stupid!" yelled Albus, to whom this was the greatest insult. "Stupid, is it? I'm cleverer than you – I've done something you couldn't. Oh, what's the use."

He jammed his shoe back on and picked up his trunk, lying in the living room like most of his belongings. He levitated some of these into the trunk at random, and closed the lid before he'd filled it. Then he grasped it – "Albus, Albus!" said Teddy – and stormed off, once again leaving the building physically, via the front door.

*

When Teddy woke up the next morning he remembered that you should never go to bed without cheering yourself up a bit first; otherwise you are apt to feel even worse in the morning. Scorpius was already up and depressing, either sitting in silence or wandering round. If it was just Teddy who'd fallen out with Albus, he'd probably go and find Albus to make it up right away. Albus was probably already expecting something of the kind from one or both of them. But reconciling Albus and Scorpius was more difficult. Scorpius had enough weaknesses when dealing with people as it was. He couldn't afford to land himself with another, as would be the result of going to Albus and saying, I'm sure you were right all along. Which Teddy was sure Albus would insist upon longer than Scorpius could hold out, either against saying it or giving up on him altogether. Teddy knew Scorpius was distraught at the possibility he'd fallen out with Albus for good – partly though the evidence of his own eyes, partly from trying to see through Scorpius's. Apart from his family, Albus and Teddy were the only people Scorpius had under his belt, so to speak. He could hardly afford to lose one without feeling pretty shitty about it. Teddy was unwilling to make a move on sorting out the mess himself; Scorpius could so easily end up on the wrong side, shut out. It was such a sad situation.

It took Teddy a while of searching for a distraction before he remembered the daydream machine. He sat down with it. It had a long stem, at the base of which was a little box which you loaded up with the cubes from a bag hung around it – little tarnished silver things, and quite, quite sealed. At the top of the stem there was a lens, like a quizzing glass, only backed with silver. Teddy put the cubes in and put his eye to the glass.

He heard the cubes clanking by his feet every so often as he saw – small, gold-slippered feet and white petticoats swirling beneath scarlet and gold skirts, which seemed his own. And glimpses of a man, now closer, now further, always with a firm grip on one's arm. One knows he is a prince, this man dressed in green, because one is so proud to dance with him. And one has been dancing for a long time now . . . The floor is white marble and there are red prints on it, one's gold slippers gleaming a little too much . . .

Then one is a great lady surrounded by suitors, and one sends each of them off on a quest in search of an impossible treasure. One knows that they will all fail and die, and that is a sweet sadness, but how one would love whoever returned and, with trembling pride, presented some marvel.

And one is falling from a tower, tumbling over in the air, one's skirts full of fire, one's hair streaming in the wind . . .

Teddy pushed the lens away from his eyes before he could become engaged in an erotic fantasy about being eaten by wolves. The thing had obviously belonged to some dreadful teenage girl.

He went to find Scorpius. "I've just been looking at the daydream machine-"

"Oh, I've seen it," said Scorpius. "Weird, isn't it?" He looked at Teddy. "You know, that's the sort of thing you ought to do."

Teddy rolled his eyes at yet another person telling him he ought to do something creative.

"You should! It's all about pictures in your head, and that's all you've got." Seeing Teddy's face, he added "Not that you can't do loads of stuff with the things in your head. But this is something that doesn't need you to subvert either your imagination or the task at hand to make them work together – your imagination is the task at hand."

"I want to be challenged," Teddy said.

"But you're not, not with any of the things you've been doing. Well, I know you are, but you're not creating anything. It's like, you live in your own world. If you do that, the only way to be a real person in this one is to bring something back from that world. It's like an exchange, a presence for an absence. Otherwise you're not using yourself up like people are always telling you you should – live life like the Pancake Day before death, that sort of thing."

Teddy thought about it. He thought, with some reluctance, that he knew what Scorpius meant. The exchange thing struck a chord, because that was what his recent activities had been about – stealing something but arranging something to take the place of the event of theft in the stealee's experience. However –

"I've been creating events," he said.

Scorpius looked thoughtful. "In one way, but in another way, no. What you do is about neutralising peoples' reactions to what you've done. So you put something into the world – a theft, which isn't all that constructive – and then you take it away."

Teddy thought about that, too. What Teddy liked best were possibilities, and if he wanted to keep them, they had to remain unrealised. Otherwise you could only have one, and it wasn't a possibility any longer, it was just whatever you happened to be doing with your life. He wondered if part of his affinity for them was that he himself was the child of unrealised possibilities. Only, your life was what was handed to you when you were born, and the only thing anyone or any god could judge you by was what you at least tried to do with it. Maybe it was your imperative to burn your best to fuel it. Maybe, dreams were alright if you were that sort of person, but you had to get up and dance with them where people could see, not just sit and talk.

Everybody has their own strange little psychodramas. Teddy felt decidedly sullen about Scorpius trawling through his, but couldn't be bothered with a retaliatory "I'll tell you how to live your life, shall I?" He could well believe that Scorpius, at this moment, was preoccupied with the question of how to pay the world for one's keep and use oneself up. The matter of Teddy was just an overlap.

Although, on the other hand, it did suggest that Scorpius had been thinking about Teddy, what he was like, these two years. Teddy had always got the idea Scorpius liked him, but it was nice to know a little of what went through his head while he was liking him. Pleasant too was the idea that Scorpius cared what he should do for the best.

"I don't see why it has to be the big "What I Do Next"," said Teddy. "But I probably would find it interesting, to see if I could work out how to do it. I'd start fresh, I think, rather than trying to work out how the old ones go. And you think I should do it because I make up stories about things, but I'd want it to be more about interpretations of impressions. Only not too pretentious."

"You could change the world," Scorpius said, laughing, and stretched back. "If it caught on people could worry about forgetting to think for themselves, like the Muggles do with their technology. Or maybe people will think better than they ever did before. Like with Shakespeare." Muggle Studies laid a possibly exaggerated emphasis on Shakespeare, leaving the post-war generation with a confused impression that almost everything could be related to Shakespeare.

An owl was sent to Harold. Teddy sadly remembered the last time they'd handed something over to him, the three of them together like normal. Then he remembered he'd been pretty pissed off, what with Clarissa. For a moment he recalled his Clarissa-misery and thought it might be a good distraction from everything else, but it wasn't that sort of misery. It was the feeling that was sorry for itself and wanted other people to make things better. If they didn't, and they usually didn't, then the misery became about the failure of other people to give what was needed, rather than the original source.

Later, Harold arrived. He at once went to look through the lens of the daydream machine, and appeared startled but pleased.

"You ought to try making these," he said, counting the silver cubes.

"Oh, go away," said Teddy.

"I've got another commission for you."

"Coming thick and fast these days," commented Teddy.

The commission was a dagger. It didn't belong to a collector, being a family heirloom. The thing about the dagger was that it was a transfigured man. One Ralph Pursingham. He was a sixteenth century man, who'd been turned into a glass bowl following a disagreement. Transfiguration of the living into inanimate objects didn't happen very often because most people couldn't do it. When it was done, it was usually with the intention that the object not survive long. However, Ralph the bowl, transfigured in 1602, survived over fifty years. He was known to have been restored to himself some time in the seventeenth century by some witch nobody knew anything of. His time in the seventeenth century was cut short when he was again transfigured, this time into a silver dagger, probably by the same mysterious witch.

Apparently Francis Pursingham, not the dagger, is what's wanted by Harold and patron. Teddy was not sure how good a thing that was for Pursingham, he wondered about Harold's patron sometimes. Teddy and Scorpius enjoyed thinking about the whole thing, not least imagining how bloody surprised the unfortunate Pursingham would be.

"Not made much of a success of life, has he?" said Scorpius.

"Think how his mother would have felt, looking at him as a baby, if she'd known he'd live twenty-four years of real life, then end up as a knife centuries after all the other babies were dead."

Teddy thought about transfiguration, and wondered about the sort of person you'd have to be to push the art to its furthest, most unnatural limits. Then he thought about people as objects, and what the objects would be like if they were to represent the people. He flirted with the idea of being a clock, himself, but decided that he was a marble. Scorpius and Albus could be marbles too. He thought about being a green marble, but settled on clear, mostly filled with swirls of mauve, that calm, chalky mauve his hair had been after the green, before the blue. Scorpius-marble would be indigo, Albus apple green with dashes of scarlet.

Teddy wanted to ask Scorpius and Albus how they felt about coloured marbles as materialisations of their essential selves, but Albus wasn't there.

The next day they got a nasty letter from Albus, full of heavy-handed sarcasm on the theme of "So sorry to have made a nuisance of myself all this time." Many references to irreconcilable differences. "However low your estimate of my intelligence, I dare say you don't know how I achieved the Gringotts break in," he pontificated in the manner of a would-be murderer availing himself of a listening ear. It turned out that he'd unearthed a very old protective charm, something like a bubble (which explained the sensation of being in a hamster's exercise ball) which shielded from everything except those chill winds.

It was a very depressing letter; the melodrama was such that Albus would feel he lost face by retracting it. Teddy had never known Albus to voluntarily lose face.

*

They cracked on with their plans to be the next thing to happen to Pursingham. It was going to be another loitering-outside-the-window jobs. They did a lot of these, and even Teddy, who prided himself on never being bored, had got tired of them. Albus had never found them satisfactory. Teddy was about to strike another note on the theme of matter rebelling. He loved both the idea in itself and the way his actions had made the idea nebulous fact for the wizarding public.

After some preliminary palava (Teddy was disguised as a Muggle postman, and Scorpius was Disillusioned) they located the whereabouts of the knife – the front room. They performed spells to render the wall between the front room and the road transparent to their eyes, and then they were in their loitering position. They could see the knife, lying alone on a small table, the silver and the polished wooden surface gleaming in the sunlight from the window.

"Let's just keep it to the dagger and the table," said Scorpius.

Teddy nodded, a little disappointed. There would be less chaos than he'd been anticipating, but then he didn't know how must of the substances in the room would react. He didn't want to risk deadly fumes where deadly fumes there need not be. Together, he and Scorpius cast their spell. The table's surface seemed to lose its shape and spill at once upwards and downwards. The shining smooth surface of the wood blistered into bark as a large tree took root in the living room, the trunk passing through the hole it had forced in the ceiling. The floor around its base was crumpled in little heaps over its roots. Molten silver dripped from a bough, trickling down the trunk like tears. As if released from the silver, a form slid down the tree like vapour rising from the metal. Then there was a man slumped in a heap underneath the tree, and there were no longer any silver tear-tracks on the bark. A young man, in bright, old-fashioned clothes, staring around him at an aghast loss.

Teddy opened the window. "I'm afraid it's 2025 now," he said.

Pursingham stared at him in rejecting disbelief.

"I know, you do have a complicated life. You'd better climb through this window, no good will come of you here."

Pursingham stood up and Teddy watched with concern as he wailed, a long, stricken yell. His edges shrank inwards and became shiny: the dagger again, poised in the air. Teddy's heart sank. He'd thought the spell to revert objects to their most basic matter such a neat solution, but apparently human transfiguration threw the thing off. He hurriedly stepped back from the window as the knife made straight for him. Scorpius was caught off guard, and the dagger stabbed right through his hand. They both gasped. Teddy threw a hex at the dagger, but it only came after Scorpius with redoubled violence, stabbing at his arms when he tried to bat it away. Teddy wondered whether all was yet lost from a professional point of view and tried to capture the knife, which jerked out of his hands. It stabbed once at his arm before twisting round, going straight for Scorpius's heart. Teddy gave it up, grabbed Scorpius's arm and Disapparated.

Scorpius sat down on the sofa, pale and sudden. Teddy rushed off to find the medical magic book his grandmother had given him. Working tentatively he managed to knit Scorpius's wounds together before working on his own – just a scratch, but deep. Scorpius sat back, holding his arms in front of him, his eyebrows raised wincingly. Teddy winced too. His arms were still welted, and the hole through his left palm was now a deep dent. Teddy jumped up again to fetch the Murtlap essence. On his way he saw a letter on the floor by the window. He handed the essence to Scorpius. While Teddy opened the letter, Scorpius transfigured a newspaper on the coffee table into bandages, soaked them in the essence, and began wrapping them around his arms.

"Oh shit," Teddy said sadly. It was a moment before Scorpius looked up; tongue between his teeth, he was concentrating on winding the bandages evenly.

"What's that?"

"Another explanatory letter from Albus. He's sent anonymous letters far and wide warning about thieves using transfiguration a weapon. We should have got the Prophet yesterday, it was in there."

"Is the rebellion of matter explained?" Scorpius read from the newspaper clipping Albus had included. He laughed. "They're not sure?"

"No puzzling about why that spell went wrong, then. They were on their guard. It's such a shame. I wonder if Pursingham had an awful moment of realisation as he was turned back into a dagger. He has such a dreadful life, it's not right."

"I think it was too sudden for him to understand," Scorpius said quickly. He stared into the distance. "So, this is the moment when we escape with the money while the going is good. Albus has burned his boats, so we can take it he isn't coming back. I still don't know how that happened."

They sat in silence. Teddy couldn't quite believe that Albus had been willing to end things like this. They were friends, who wouldn't want to keep their friends? It stung so badly when you wished something hadn't turned out the way it had. He sniffed in an attempt at restorative haughtiness; it wasn't fair to be made to feel as if he and Scorpius were Albus's rejects. He put an arm round Scorpius and squeezed his shoulder with a sudden burst of affection for him, sitting there as miserable as him, with his poor arms.

"It was me that sent him off," Scorpius said. He shifted uneasily, which gave Teddy his ideas.

"We couldn't have pretended we were fine with him going to Gringotts like that," he said. One of us had to say it first, and he'd have reacted just as badly if it'd been me. If he can't cope with people not agreeing with him, that's a fault in him."

Several moments after getting his idea, Teddy managed to stop talking, which was an essential requirement of his idea.

"But I think I upset him," said Scorpius. "And I didn't mean to."

Teddy leaned forward and kissed him. He tilted his head into the archetypal kissing position and pressed his mouth against Scorpius's. For a moment he felt the warmth of Scorpius's lips against the sensitive skin of his own. Then Teddy licked Scorpius's bottom lip, flickering his tongue over the lip and into his mouth. He felt Scorpius's eyelashes brush against his cheek as he froze.

Teddy leaned back and looked hard at Scorpius.

"You need to stop doing this. I like you. I'm not going to look at you as if you've made some terrible mistake if you kiss me back. Same as people won't if you think they mean it when they talk to you, and talk back. Or even if you talk first."

Scorpius stared fixedly at a point just left of Teddy's face.

"Maybe you don't want to kiss me back. If you don't, say so. But don't think you're about to remember a prior engagement and rush off." Teddy was uncomfortably aware of sounding a little like Albus. "Come on, do something."

"I – can't," Scorpius muttered, still not looking at Teddy. Teddy said nothing. They sat for a while. Teddy stared at Scorpius's averted face as if he were alone, with hostility. Scorpius's fists were clenched. Then, very slowly, with the inevitable momentum of a sleeper's limb sliding off a bed, Scorpius leaned forward, his head slowly swerving round. He put his hands on Teddy's shoulders and kissed him. Teddy opened his mouth, his insides burning with astonished exultation, and then they were kissing properly. Teddy liked kissing Scorpius, liked feeling his teeth against his bottom lip, liked whatever it was that people did like about mouth, saliva and warmth and tongue. He shifted his hips; his cock was hard. Scorpius pressed his body closer to Teddy's. Teddy ghosted a hand over his groin; he was hard too.

"Let's go in my room," said Teddy.

Scorpius's forehead was slightly puckered while they took their clothes off. It wasn't as if he had had any sexual experience, Teddy reminded himself, watching him carefully slide his t-shirt over his bandaged arms, eyeing the pale smooth skin, the bumps of his ribs, pale pink nipples. (Actually, he'd once been the surprised recipient of a blowjob from an acquaintance of Albus's.)

Scorpius was naked before Teddy and sat back on his haunches while Teddy, bare-chested himself, sat on the edge of the bed to take his shoes off. Being naked with people always reminded him of the times he'd been put to share a bath with Victoire as a small child – reinforced, naturally, by the amount of naked time he'd gone on to spend with her. It would take him a moment to get over wanting to ask if he could spit his toothpaste into the bathwater.

He knelt up with Scorpius. He kissed him, running his hands over all the naked skin to acclimatise himself. Scorpius planted a warm hand in the small of Teddy's back. When Teddy's hand closed over Scorpius's cock, Scorpius trailed his finger up and down Teddy's spine, which was sensitive. He stopped pulling and stroking, and tried to push Scorpius down.

His breath just brushed Scorpius's cock before Scorpius's fingers poked below the back of Teddy's jeans. Struggling up, he undid them. Teddy did the job of pulling his jeans off his legs, and Scorpius gripped him by the hips and pushed him onto his back. He leaned over him, raised up on his arms, and looked at Teddy like he was going to kiss him. Instead he licked the hollow of his neck, and a nipple, and kissed his belly button. Then he was at a level with Teddy's cock, sticking up at a jaunty angle. Teddy watched his tongue circle a careful lick around the head, then gasped as the tongue passed lingeringly over the head. Then Scorpius took his cock into his mouth.

Teddy could feel his face assume the heavy lidded smirk of sheer physical happiness. It was a careful blowjob, relying more on licking than sucking, but it was very nice. And it was so nice and exciting that he had his cock in Scorpius's mouth. Because he liked Scorpius. Then there was the moment just before he came when happiness was replaced by something sharper and harder. Scorpius swallowed some of his come, and they looked at each other and laughed softly.

After Teddy blew Scorpius in return they lay stretched out, side by side.

"Why do you like me?" Scorpius asked, and Teddy remembered what he'd said earlier. He thought about it.

"I suppose a large part of what I like about you is that things are so painful and difficult for you. But then that is a large part of you, or at least it is right now, so I couldn't like you all that much if I didn't like that. I think you seem particularly . . . real for me. I think about the blood in your veins. Maybe because it's pumped round your body every second, and you're always ticking away in your head every second, never letting up. It's like Albus is querulous and ambitious and he wants things all the time – and that's what makes him real. I think everyone has their own thing they need to get over, and that's one of the particular things that tends to make everyone their realest. And yours is so close to the surface because it's, I mean, talking to people. I think you will always be quite fun for me, because I like people I can see working. Either I'll see you trying to work out what to say and when to say it, and feeling that with you, or I'll see you getting over it and really that's much more fun. Because it's getting tiresome for you to ever be like that with me. And, I like how you're quite calm and cheerful in yourself, and don't like upsetting people. And how you're resourceful and think things I can't see."

He came to a halt. Scorpius's eyes widened. "I think your thing you need to get over is writing essays in your head and reading them out loud to people. Some of it was nice, I suppose, but what would anyone want to know all that for?" He laughed in a disbelieving, slightly aggressive way. "Nice to know whatever happens I'll be interesting."

"I mean softer things too," Teddy protested. He saw, belatedly, that maybe the things he'd said had been a bit bony for an explanation of why you liked someone. "Actually," he said, "You can fuck off not liking analysis and essays. You went on and on about my career path the other day."

"Just as well I did. We seem to be out of a job," said Scorpius.

Teddy thought about that, and bloody overreacting Albus, and Scorpius's poor arms, but the thoughts seemed to stop just outside him. The delicious triviality of sex wouldn't let other things in. He rolled onto his side and turned his face into Scorpius's shoulder, slinging an arm over his stomach. Warm skin-on-skin, the feeling that some things at least would work themselves out. They drifted off into afternoon sleep. One thing did penetrate Teddy's haze a little before he fell asleep; the thought Albus would be furious.

*

Scorpius was a little strange over the next couple of weeks. It was as if he was in a train station, walking up and down the platform, waiting for a train to arrive. Not exactly depressed or anxious but . . .busy, inside his head. Teddy guessed that much of the distraction was dwelling on Albus, trying to think up ways to resolve his estrangement. Also to all the talk of getting over one's own particularly thing, and doing what one really ought with life.

He seemed actively happy, too. Teddy was happy – not in an ecstatic, blazing way, or a lazy satisfaction, but something like the way you might be when you are alone in the dark. There is no reason to be happy, and no reason not to be. You can hear yourself humming, maybe. Scorpius was the sound of that hum in the dark. They'd had sex again, frequently, after that first time; Scorpius was now sleeping in Teddy's bed at night. It took him a while to come round to being fucked. He stubbornly resisted anything he thought might make him seem passive or submissive. Teddy loved knowing Scorpius sexually, being with him like that. He could kiss him, feel his fingers stabbing inside him, stroke his hair or suck his cock, or sit beside him and casually lick his neck or clutch his wrist. He liked being as physically close to someone as you could get, being so glad they were there but knowing both of them to be in their own bone house, unable to reach through the walls. Knowing that where you were was where you most wanted to be, and the most you could ask for.

*

The incident of the tree and the dagger was in the papers. One thing that gave them satisfaction (though really, should it?) was that the table, not being valuable enough to be protected against transfiguration, remained a tree. It continued to expand unnaturally in height and girth, leading Teddy to wonder whether there wasn't really something in the rebellion of matter. He heard from Harry how several Ministry departments, including the Aurors, tried to transfigure it or failing that, to fell it, but to no avail.

"It's a special tree," Teddy said happily. "Like the magic faraway tree." Teddy's mandatory family provided Muggle culture had mostly consisted of children's books.

"Or Yggdrasil," said Scorpius, a little more highbrow.

The fun for Teddy had been all about the trickery of escaping unseen. There was nothing left in it for him now everyone would know that the trickery was trickery, and what it was part of. Not to mention the anti-transfiguration charms sported by anything worth stealing these days. The venture over, he turned his thoughts to daydream machines. He spent his days writing down ideas for dozens of different versions, powered by everything from dreams themselves to dung. When he'd written all the ideas he had, he could go back and choose the best elements and make them into something better than anything he'd thought of yet. He was already itching to get back to some of the things he'd though of. Teddy felt as if he was walking along a strip of soil scattering seed, and just out of the corner of his eye he could see trees springing up behind him; trees with boughs spread high and wide for the sky, yellow green for summer, or sometimes red for autumn, or bearing blossoms or fruit. He looked forward to wandering back though the vales of trees, even if they all shrank to dowdy little shrubs when his back was turned. He felt confident he could nurse at least one back to treehood.

Teddy gave a thought to what Scorpius was to do now. "You don't need to think there's no place for you to do anything here anymore, just because I'm doing something different. It's not like the other thing wasn't my idea."

"You mean do I want to be the Rose to your Listlethwaite? No, I don't."

"So what do you plan to do?"

"I could get a job, like everyone else. You don't need to think I'll always be the same. I can change," said Scorpius, his face set. Teddy thought he was telling himself something important, never mind Teddy.

*

One day Teddy was alone, in rapt contemplation of his trees, when Albus fell out of the fireplace. Teddy laughed aloud; he was wearing robes, which these days were very much a dress-to-impress thing, and he stepped in the room with his head tilted up, and a half-spin on his heel so that his robes billowed. And he laughed because Albus was making the first move, and that had always been the only chance things had of being sorted out.

He pointed a finger at Albus. "You did something really horrible with that dagger business."

"I know," Albus began.

"When Pursingham was a dagger again it went on the rampage and pierced right through Scorpius's hand. And stabbed at his arms."

"What, like Jesus? God, I feel terrible. Did you manage to heal him alright?"

"More or less," Teddy admitted. "It could have killed one or both of us."

"Never mind. Where's Scorpius?" asked Albus.

"Malfoy Manor. His parents are away so he's gone to see the cat and stuff. Well, I don't know if they actually have a cat."

"Will he be back soon?"

"Shouldn't be too long. Do you want me to owl him?" Teddy offered, and Albus acquiesced.

They settled down to wait and Albus said, "So what are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to make a daydream machine."

"That's a good idea!" said Albus, as the gleam that belonged to a member of the family that had been urging Teddy to "do something creative" for years flashed in his eyes.

"Yeah yeah," said Teddy. "Although, you know what I haven't finished with? Francis Pursingham."

"I really wished that hadn't been the one I'd messed up when I saw it in the paper," Albus said.

"I can't leave him to be a dagger forever. I'll have to think of something."

"So will I," said Albus, snottily humble.

Teddy told Albus about how he wanted his daydream machine to work with what was in its users heads, rather than being pre-set, like the existing ones. Albus started an argument about there not being a difference between daydream machine and his uncles' charms. He sat back with satisfaction as Teddy went off on a rant about charms alone being far too limited for what he wanted to achieve, and he didn't want to be rude, but he'd always found the WWW daydream charms far too generic to be any good. Then he remembered that there was no achievement in luring Teddy into a rant, and grew bored.

He was brought to attention by Teddy saying, "Do you know what you should do? Go and fight dragons." Albus stared at him in bewilderment. "I mean in the Muggle sense. Prove yourself by acts of derring do. Remember you wanted to perform impossible thieving tasks? I think the world of heroes and tasks is your natural sphere. It wouldn't be too like your father because he doesn't want to be a hero – he did everything by accident. But sometimes it's okay to want to be somebody wonderful. You could rescue people – that'd be nice."

Albus stared at him, his mouth twisted in the beginnings of ridicule, his eyes thoughtful. "I'm not being a Healer."

"Oh no, we'll have to think of something glamorous."

Then an owl from Scorpius arrived – "Can't see him right now, am busy." Albus looked sad, while Teddy stared at the message open-mouthed.

"What's he said that for? I know he wants to make up with you. And busy doing what?"

"Shall we just go and see him?" Albus asked. "I'm fed up of waiting. We don't have to worry about getting in, I could do that thing I did for Gringotts."

Teddy made a face but reached for Albus's arm. There was again that really annoying feeling of rolling around in a hamster ball, and there they were in the Malfoys' hall, ceiling rising high above them. They set off to look for Scorpius. They looked all over the place, and were beginning to wonder if he was there at all, when they stumbled into a huge cavernous room with stone walls. There was plenty of light from the windows running around the room, high up.

Scorpius was there, at second sight. He was sitting at the kitchen table leaning forward, his chin on his hands, sending a beam of satisfaction in their general direction. Only when he saw them, he sat up with a sharp movement. The three of them were only intermittently visible to each other past the cantering forms of the other three in the room. Three golems, in the guise of pre-Raphaelite Arthurian knights, seated on gleaming white horses.

"Are the horses real or are they golems too?" Teddy asked.

"Our quest has been crowned with glory!" yelled the golem Albus was trying to corner for a closer look. Albus touched the horse's side.

"No, it's not real," he said.

"But it's not like there's six golems, either," Scorpius said. I formed each knight together with its horse. I don't think the knights could actually get off their horses."

"I like the horses," said Teddy, managing to stroke the flank of one. It had a curious feel; the smoothness of skin and the warmth of body heat layered over the chill smoothness of porcelain. Each of the horses had rich saddlecloths, in jewel-like shades of red, blue and purple. "They've got eyes, and eyelashes."

Scorpius's mouth was pursed. He was not happy; they'd entirely ruined his big gesture.

"Were you going to steal the faux grail?" asked Teddy, going to sit in the chair next to Scorpius. "But what an odd thing to do, we're not doing that anymore. And, I know that was how it started, but I'd never really have stolen the grail. It's part of history and education and I think it ought to stay where it is. The fact that it's there is a record that people wanted the grail, and that the nearest thing they could get to it is precious to them. That's a good thing. It would puzzle people if they had to wonder if the real one'd turned up, and I think the matter's too sacred for puzzling."

"Like you said, it was you who suggested it!" said Albus. "I think it would have been the best thing we'd done." Scorpius looked gratified. "Was it because I said you were a fucking, fucking coward, and you wanted to prove you had courage, and initiative and everything?"

"I suppose so."

"And," Albus's eyes narrowed, "because you met us by the grail?"

Teddy was suddenly overcome with relief for Scorpius that he had met him and Albus. He stroked Scorpius's hair back from his forehead.

"We have the cup that held the blood of the Lamb!" the golems sang out together.

Albus leaned uncomfortably over Scorpius and kissed him. Teddy saw Scorpius's mouth open in surprise, and then into the kiss. He clasped the side of Albus's face, Albus holding his jaw between his hands. Teddy wasn't sure he should be there. Maybe he was just an adjunct to the reconciliatory romance of antagonism between Albus and Scorpius. But he took Scorpius's hand while Scorpius kissed Albus, and he squeezed back. He ran a finger down the back of Albus's neck, Albus now straddling Scorpius, and thought, almost for the first time, of his being eight years older than they were.

Albus stood up and held out a hand to Scorpius and Teddy.

"Come on, let's go home."

"But what about-" Scorpius asked, indicating the golems.

Albus sealed the door. "We can come back and get them later."

"And do what with them?" Teddy and Scorpius demanded, determined to block any suggestion that they be destroyed.

"Well, we'll think of something," said Albus as they Disapparated.

There they were in Teddy's bedroom. "Come here," said Albus, stretching his arms out to Teddy. Teddy stepped forwards and kissed him. He'd always like people who kissed fiercely, and Albus kissed harder and fiercer than anyone else he'd kissed. His mouth seemed like he would have been smiling if he hadn't been kissing, and that made Teddy happy. It was a little strange to be kissing Albus because he'd known him so long and never thought of it before, but he liked it. He liked Albus.

Scorpius sat on the bed, his eyes glued to them. "I want you here, okay," Albus said to Teddy, and launched himself on Scorpius who tumbled backwards, Albus on top of him. Teddy sprawled on the bed, leaning on his elbow, while Scorpius tugged Albus's t-shirt halfway up his back before they got distracted as Albus rocked back and forth, the motion rubbing their cocks together. They took their clothes of in the end. Scorpius laughed when Albus began to suck his cock. There seemed to be laughter brimming up inside him, just under his skin. Teddy scooted over to kiss him, and Scorpius laughed into his mouth, arms wrapped round his neck.

Albus pulled off Scorpius's cock and turned to the bedside table. Scorpius found the lubricant and pushed Albus onto his back, his legs open. He scooped the lube up with his fingers and circled Albus's arsehole before pushing a finger in. It was shortly followed by another, and he stabbed them in and out with a businesslike manner. He pushed a third in, and Albus moaned.

"More lube," he said. Scorpius applied a little more to the inner rim of Albus's anus, and smeared his own cock with it. Albus got off the bed, Scorpius sat up, and Albus straddled him, lowering himself slowly onto his cock. They fucked, and they looked happy to be fucking each other, both flushed and laughing under their breaths. Teddy's hand was on his cock. He was reasonably sure they wanted him there, and in a weird way he was just glad Scorpius and Albus were getting on so well. He watched as they came, Scorpius with a shout of laughter, Albus's laugh cut off by a gasp. They stayed still for a moment, then Scorpius pushed Albus off and toppled backwards. Albus lay down next to him. Faces beatifically calm, if flushed, they looked at Teddy.

"Take your clothes off," Albus said. His face sharpened as Teddy did, seeing him naked for the first time. Teddy crawled between them. Scorpius spooned behind him, transferring a thin glaze of Albus's come from his stomach to Teddy's hip. They lay for a while. Scorpius trailed his fingers along his ribs while Albus alternated between kissing him and blowing in his eye. (Teddy didn't know why he did that, but it didn't annoy him enough to object.) After a while he got tired of the let's-pay-attention-to-Teddy thing and reached for Albus's cock. It wasn't quite at half-mast, and Teddy wanked him until he was hard, and smiling up at him. Teddy wasn't quite used to all this smiling and laughing; it brought back memories of Victoire.

Albus turned Teddy onto his stomach. Before bringing the lubricant into play, he licked a little at his arsehole, tongue darting and flickering beautifully. While Albus fucked him, Teddy realised with mixed feelings that nothing seemed to mean anything right now. Not in a miserable heartless way, it was just that his head was unwontedly quiet and empty. Well, he loved Albus, and he loved Scorpius, but that was all. He supposed it would start up again soon enough.

fin


	2. Chapter 2

This story is complete, and all contained in the first chapter, but the posting seems to have got fouled up.


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